Today we’re talking about something that’s top-of-mind for a lot of you: closing the reliability gaps in increasingly complex analog and mixed-signal IC designs—and doing it earlier, faster, and more systematically.

As designs become more heterogeneous and integration of IP blocks more intricate, traditional simulation and ERC tools often aren’t enough. They’re reactive by nature, catching issues too late in the flow—when rework is costly, and design intent is harder to trace.

That’s why “shift-left” verification has become more than just a buzzword. It’s a strategic necessity. And today’s conversation is all about one of the tools helping to make that shift actionable: Siemens’ Insight Analyzer.

Professor Gert Cauwenberghs has been working toward building brain-scale systems for decades. At the University of California San Diego, he’s now one of the leaders of the Neuromorphic Commons hub, also known as Thor, which will give the wider community access to neuromorphic hardware and simulators. In this episode of Brains and Machines, he talks to Dr. Sunny Bains of University College London about his approach to making systems that use minimal energy, are highly interconnected at all levels, and are surprisingly flexible. Discussion follows with Dr. Giulia D’Angelo from the Czech Technical University in Prague and Professor Ralph Etienne-Cummings of Johns Hopkins University.

Professor Gordon Cheng builds humanoid robots that can feel their environment using artificial skin. In this episode of Brains and Machines, he talks to Dr. Sunny Bains of University College London about how the skin was designed, how it improves safety and why neuromorphic engineering will be important for machine autonomy. Discussion follows with Dr. Giulia D’Angelo from the Czech Technical University in Prague and Professor Ralph Etienne-Cummings of Johns Hopkins University.

Professor Gordon Cheng builds humanoid robots that can feel their environment using artificial skin. In this episode of Brains and Machines, he talks to Dr. Sunny Bains of University College London about how the skin was designed, how it improves safety, and why neuromorphic engineering will be important for machine autonomy. Discussion follows with Dr. Giulia D’Angelo from the Czech Technical University in Prague and Professor Ralph Etienne-Cummings of Johns Hopkins University.

Dr. Charlotte Frenkel from the Technical University of Delft set records with a low-power neuromorphic chip she designed as part of her Ph.D. In this episode of Brains and Machines, she talks to Dr. Sunny Bains of University College London about what she has learned about building simplicity into chips and integrity into benchmarks. Discussion follows with Dr. Giulia D’Angelo from the Czech Technical University in Prague and Professor Ralph Etienne-Cummings of Johns Hopkins University.

The semiconductor industry is undergoing a shift with the rapid adoption of multi-die design, driven by the promise of improved power, performance, and area (PPA). But with innovation comes complexity, and one of the biggest challenges is ensuring silicon reliability and health through effective multi-die testing.

In this episode, we dive deep into the world of multi-die design for test: what it means, how it differs from traditional monolithic design testing, and why it’s critical for the future of semiconductor manufacturing. Learn how testing spans from individual dies to multiple dies to die-to-die links, and why silicon data is essential for maintaining multi-die health during both manufacturing and in-field operations. We will explore the future of multi-die design for test and discuss Silicon Lifecycle Management (SLM) strategies that designers can implement today to stay ahead.

Dharmendra Modha’s TrueNorth chip added the word neuromorphic to the technorati lexicon back in 2014. In this episode of Brains and Machines, he talks to Sunny Bains of University College London about how that project led to his work on NorthPole and the axiomatic approach he took to design. 

In this episode of Brains and Machines, Dr. Terry Sejnowski talks to Dr. Sunny Bains of the University College London about how information flows both ways between neuroscience and engineered intelligence, proposes a new way of looking at memory and considers the Hopfield-Hinton Nobel Prize. 

Dr. Jennifer Hasler of Georgia Tech is best known for her work with field programmable analog arrays (FPAAs). In this episode of Brains and Machines, she talks about the importance of, and progress in, analog electronics for AI with Dr. Sunny Bains of the University College London. Discussion follows with Dr .Giulia D’Angelo from the Czech Technical University in Prague and Professor Ralph Etienne-Cummings of Johns Hopkins University.

Dr. Tony Lewis, CTO of BrainChip, and four other key scientists talk to Dr. Sunny Bains of University College London. They discuss their business strategy, their temporal event-based neural network (TENN) and the next iteration of the Akida chip. Discussion follows with Dr. Giulia D’Angelo from the Czech Technical University in Prague and Prof. Ralph Etienne-Cummings of Johns Hopkins University.