About the Speaker

Darron May brings over four decades of experience in electronics, spanning board, FPGA, and chip design & verification, with extensive roles in sales, applications, and technical marketing. A key architect of innovative Verification Management solutions, he drove the business plan and architected Verification IQ, a collaborative, AI-powered solution. Now Director of AI Product Management in Siemens EDA’s Design Verification Technology Division, Darron oversees AI integration across the entire Questa One portfolio and shapes the strategic vision for Agentic RTL Sign-off and AI Driven Spec-to-RTL. Previously, he held roles at Racal Datacom, Model Technology Inc., and other leading EDA companies.

Agentic AI and the Rise of the Design & Verification Scientist

Overview

The complexity of modern SoC design has outpaced our methodologies and the wall between design and verification has made it worse. Agentic AI solves both. Autonomous systems that reason, plan, and adapt across the chip development lifecycle don’t just accelerate workflows, they dissolve boundaries between creation and validation entirely. Semantic layers unite isolated EDA tools into collaborative, context-aware partners, giving rise to the Design & Verification Scientist: an engineer orchestrating intelligence across the full flow to achieve trusted RTL signoff at unprecedented speed and confidence. The silo era is ending. The scientist era is beginning.

Key Points

• Agentic AI is not incremental automation, it is autonomous reasoning, planning, and adaptation across the entire chip development lifecycle
• Semantic layers transform isolated EDA tools into collaborative, context-aware partners, dissolving the boundary between design and verification.
• This convergence creates a new engineering archetype, the Design & Verification Scientist, orchestrating AI across the full flow to achieve trusted RTL signoff.