From Concept to Product in 4 Months: The AI & Open Source Revolution in EDA

Srinivasa Reddy N: Hi Shashi, Radha, Suraj, thanks for accepting our invitation to interact with and learn more about the latest EDA as well as your startup KERET EDA, very interesting. I'm the chief editor of E-Roll, welcome to this meet. Yeah and I'm Ashish, I'm the U.S. based editor here on the east coast.

Ashish Rao: I know you guys are enjoying sunny California, so great to have you guys. I would prefer to begin by asking each of you your journey, very interesting journey. I'm very sure our readers and listeners and the audience would like to see that, so if you each of you can walk us through your brief journey to KERET EDA, that would be really great.

SASHI: Thank you, thank you Srinivas and thank you Ashish for this fabulous opportunity. Let me start first, my name is Sashi, Sashi Obilisetty and I've had a wonderful EDA journey and my journey started right out of grad school. I actually, I may have worked for a couple of years, but then I founded my first company called Dualsoft and Dualsoft was focused on RTL analysis and that was the early days of you know RTL analysis and linting. You know folks would just write code and you know send it right away to a synthesis tool or simulation tool, something like that, but lint was a new market. But what that told me is that this is an area which is really wonderful in terms of technology, you can build new tools. So after Dualsoft, I went on to start another company, this time in verification space and that was also an interesting time because verification languages were becoming very popular. For example, OpenVera was being adopted, there were these fights of OpenVera and e-language and then finally System Verilog took over with all its verification constructs and all that. So the industry really started adopting System Verilog. So I had a company in that space, it was called Very Easy Solutions, kind of an interesting name. And then in the 2009 time frame, after Very Easy, I decided to join Synopsys and I was very very involved in all of Synopsys verification products all the way from VCS and the formal tools and you know sort of the static formal. That was my background and I brought that to Synopsys. There was also a very interesting opportunity to build the AI team in Synopsys because this is we're talking 2015 and you know people had just started talking about AI, you know, is it like a solution looking for a problem and all that, right? So we, I got that opportunity and I started the AI team in Synopsys. I was there for about five, six years, got an opportunity to grow the usage of chip design on cloud with Google Cloud. So that's how I made my journey over. It's actually, they're very close, Synopsys and Google are very close in terms of location, though this was all during COVID. Working from home was the mantra then, right? But I think the building tool bit me again and I came back to Synopsys after a year. This time I worked on the post-silicon side of Synopsys. I was there for until last year and then, you know, like everybody this whole LLM hit me also and I kind of remember, Srinivas, was what you said, why is she not starting a company and I also felt it is criminal not to start a company. Yes, indeed. You know, that's how CaretEDA came about and we'll talk more about what we do, but over to my, you know, brilliant co-founders.

Radha: Okay, I'm going to grab it. So she has told brilliant, so if nobody acknowledges soon, I'm going to grab it. Yeah, so yes, mine is a, you know, fairly straightforward story. I joined Synopsys as a campus hire in 2006. It had been a fantastic long journey, so I have been in the platform engineering side wherein, you know, we used to optimize all the Synopsys tools for a better performance, make it work on different hardware, different OS and all that. I have been out and out open source enthusiast and I have always worked on Linux and, you know, it is a very passionate thing to be part of open source and AI had been another, you know, super fun thing and at home also I keep running something, you know, some fun projects, you know, having my son as a gamer, so he bought a GPU and I used it to run some open night models, you know, figure out what we can do best, you know, and then there is a constant fight, right? So you are using my machine, you are loading my machine, so all that happens. So all the fun things happen and, you know, I met Shashi, I think, when she started the AI team. So that time I had a, you know, running project on AI and, you know, she gracefully accepted my application and I made an internal boot to Shashi. That is how our, you know, partnership started about, you know, five, six years back or something. Then, you know, when Shashi came back for silicon life cycle management, the post silicon, there was a team on cloud analytics, so everything suited, super exciting time, so we did it and LLM came and, you know, this is my first time, unlike Shashi, I had no, this one I was a very, you know, committed synopsis engineer through and through, I did 20 years there. Then, but when Shashi is starting this, it was, you know, all the best things coming together. I mean, LLMs and, you know, open source, all my favorite topics, it's, it would be unfair to not grab this opportunity. So super excited, you know, to be part of this and that's how all this started with that. Yeah, another brilliant co-founder. Hi. Hi, Srinivas.

Suraj: Hi. Hi. This is Suraj, as you know. So my actually complete experience is in the software side and this, this, and I'm very fairly new to this EDA world and I'm kind of learning from Shashi and from the customers, what are the challenges are there and how we can solve these challenges using LLMs. So, yeah. And I did work with Shashi and Radha in the synopsis and after coming out of the synopsis, we did discuss about this and yeah, I thought it's a interesting, interesting idea to start Carrot EDA and certainly looking forward to learn more and kind of explore the LLM world. Yeah, that's all from me. That's great. Fantastic journey.