Date: 29 July,2026
Time: 16:00 – 17:30 Israel time
Speaker: Asi Sapir, Synopsys
Language: English
Location: Zoom
Abstract:
In 2017, DeepMind’s AlphaZero learned to play chess, Go, and shogi from scratch with no human game data, no hand-crafted heuristics, just the rules and three days of self-play. In Go, it beat AlphaGo, the system that had just defeated the world champion, 100 games to zero, discovering strategies that 3,000 years of human play had never produced. That moment was not just a milestone in game-playing AI. It was a preview of what is coming in every complex engineering domain.
This talk traces that same three-phase arc inside electronic design automation. Phase one is AI as optimizer: reinforcement-learning systems like DSO.ai and VSO.ai that search the implementation space more efficiently than human teams, delivering 25% power reduction and 4.5% frequency improvement on production designs. Phase two is AI as assistant and co-creator: the Synopsys.ai Copilot, which answers tool questions in natural language, generates Tcl and Python scripts on demand, creates RTL and testbenches from design specifications, and produces SVA assertions for formal verification. Phase three, where we are today, is AI as autonomous agent: systems that accept a goal (“autonomously improve this RTL for power and performance”), then plan, orchestrate, and execute multi-step EDA workflows with minimal human intervention.
Bio:
Asi Sapir is a hardware engineer and AI specialist at Synopsys, where he serves as Applications Engineering Sr Architect driving adoption of AI-powered EDA solutions. With 25 years of experience at Intel and three years at Synopsys, he brings deep expertise in logic design, RTL methodology, architecture, physical design, and design automation.
Asi works at the intersection of chip design methodology and artificial intelligence, helping engineering and research teams integrate reinforcement learning, generative AI, and agentic workflows into production environments. He holds a B.Sc. in Electrical Engineering from the Technion, Israel Institute of Technology, and speaks regularly on the evolution from AI assistants to autonomous agents in semiconductor design.
The webinar is free but registration is required! The zoom link will be sent after the registration.