Dec. 17, 2025 –
Cadence Design Systems’ Conformal AI Studio has been named Best EDA Product of the Year at the EE Awards Asia 2025, highlighting the industry’s recognition of a solution designed expressly for the soaring complexity of today’s SoC designs.
Organized by ASPENCORE, the publisher of EE Times and EDN in Taiwan and Asia, EE Awards Asia—now in its fifth year—honors and celebrates the contributions of Asia’s engineering community over the past year.
In an interview with EE Times Asia, Zhuo Li, Vice President of Research and Development at Cadence, detailed how the company’s latest platform is reshaping logic equivalence checking (LEC), low-power signoff, and ECO implementation using next-generation AI technologies.
Perfect storm of complexity
Over the past decade, SoC complexity has expanded at a pace that traditional verification methodologies struggle to match, according to Li. He said there are three major shifts: exploding design scale and power-domain complexity, exponential growth of LEC search space, and rising ECO volumes.
Ten to 15 years ago, SoCs commonly contained only a handful of power domains, Li said. But today’s low-power architectures employ dozens, often hundreds, of power domains.
Meanwhile, design size has ballooned almost 100x, according to Li, driven by aggressive power, performance, area (PPA) targets and advanced datapath synthesis techniques. Blocks that once consisted of 5% datapath logic now contain up to 70%, he says.
Meanwhile, a 32-bit multiplier alone presents a mathematically daunting 32! (factorial) state space. As designs evolve, these combinational and sequential complexities overwhelm conventional Boolean engines.
Last but not least, ECOs—which are formerly confined to the last week or two of design—now consume around 5–20% of the overall design cycle, primarily due to time-to-market pressure. This requires far higher automation and dramatically smaller patch sizes to remain manufacturable.
Together, these forces make conventional LEC and ECO flows increasingly impractical.