A scaling crisis in chip design
Semiconductors industry is at a precipice

The world is facing a critical bottleneck in hardware development. While AI software innovation is accelerating at an unprecedented pace, chips still take 3 - 5 years from concept to production.

Designing chips years ahead of the market introduces unbound risk of product fit, excessive bloating, long business cycles, and supply chain uncertainty.

Long business cycles and return on capital
Resource constraints and market uncertainty
Risk of unbound product-market-fit
Rigid supply chains
Traditionally, scaling to market demands meant scaling the workforce. By 2030, more than one million skilled workers will be needed to meet demand in the semiconductor industry.

Chip design is rooted in the 1990's

Despite tremendous innovations that have enabled scaling device manufacturing into the Angstrom era, the data abstractions, workflows, and tools for designing chips at large scale were invented several decades ago.

Long business cycles and return on capital
Designing content is slow, error prone
No standardized operating system
Does not scale with available compute
2-3 years to first samples with 87% of headcount budget spent on core experts

ACI® brings a new scaling factor to chip design

Cognichip is the first to debut ACI ® – Artificial Chip Intelligence, a type of artificial intelligence that understands, learns, and solves chip design problems, with designer-level cognitive abilities.

ACI® fundamentally reshapes the economics of semiconductors, bringing a 75% reduction in design effort, 50% faster completion, and eliminating excessive chip size and power, making chip design easier, more accessible, and sustainable.

With ACI, chips can finally keep pace with software innovation, allowing companies to anticipate market shifts, minimize chip bloating, and dramatically accelerate the creation of bespoke product variants.
AI first chip design

A modern, conversational design approach, leveraging secure, scalable, accelerated compute.

Physics-informed

Tailored for semiconductor design—focussing on logic and physics, not poetry or cooking recipes.

Human-centered

Built from the ground up on responsible AI principles, placing designers at the core of the decision-making process.

Built for speed

Build chips faster and save development costs. Unlock deep expertise silos and lower barriers to entry that democratize chip design.

Driven by a team of semiconductor & AI pioneers

Experts in market needs and customer pain points, delivering proven science and ML solutions.

Faraj Aalaei
Founder
Chairman & CEO
Ehsan Kamalinejad
Co-founder
Chief Technology Officer
Simon Sabato
Co-Founder
Chief Architect
Stelios Diamantidis
Chief Product Officer
Mehdi Daneshpanah
Founding VP of Software

Join our team

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We are semiconductor professionals and scientists in mathematics, physics, and computer science — uniting these disciplines with design-forward tools. Join our team to work among the interdisciplinary efforts driving meaningful innovation.