AI is Designing the Chips: The Engineers Who Trained Their Replacement — and Who's Still Holding the Pen

Abstract:

AI is building chips. Frontier models now generate production Verilog at over 89% pass rates. $635M flowed into AI-for-chip-design startups in two quarters. The capability is real, measured by chips that shipped, not by demos. But the technology is only one of three stories. The economics are restructuring engineering teams faster than headcount. And the blindspots are the part nobody is pricing in: AI-generated hardware Trojans evading detectors, analog design where AI hasn't won, and an accountability floor AI cannot cross — because when a chip ships and fails, someone has to be held to account, and that signature is a legal obligation, not a technical one. 

Speaker Bio:

Mohamed Kassem is CEO and Co-Founder of NativeChips, a company building an AI-powered platform that turns natural language into manufactured silicon. NativeChips automates large portions of the chip design flow using multi-agent AI — from a plain-English description of what you need to a manufacturing-ready design — making custom chips accessible to companies that were never able to afford them or had the expertise to build them before. Mohamed also founded ChipFoundry, a community initiative making chip fabrication accessible at a fraction of traditional cost — to startups, researchers, and independent designers. Before NativeChips, as CTO of Efabless, he built the chipIgnite platform and the open-source silicon infrastructure behind hundreds of community-driven chip designs — helping turn open-source chip design from a research concept into real chips, shipped.