AIStorm puts computation where light and sound first become electrical charge. Its wager is that useful intelligence can arrive sooner when a device has less data to move.
A chip factory is a costly place to ask “what if?” Silvaco gives engineers a virtual rehearsal, then connects the physics to circuits, reusable chip designs and AI-trained digital twins.
The processor gets the applause. Sonics built the connections that kept it supplied, then taught idle circuits to switch off. Facebook bought the team and technology in 2019.
AI chips have become ravenous for data. Eliyan sells the connections that let compute, memory and whole packages keep up - and bets that cheaper packaging can be a competitive weapon.
Once a maker of Bitcoin miners, the Santa Clara chip company now offers AI builders a different prize: more computing inside the same power budget. The arithmetic is promising; the hard part is making a lower-voltage chip behave.
Expedera’s founders looked at neural networks and saw an old networking problem. Their answer is a packet-based engine that chipmakers can license, resize and tuck into everything from phones to cars.

The chips powering AI, cars and data centers are becoming cities in miniature. Michal Siwinski has built a career explaining why their roads, rules and security matter as much as their engines.
Modern chips are crowded cities, and the roads now matter as much as the buildings. Arteris turned that traffic problem into a licensing business used across more than 4 billion chips and chiplets - while learning that connectivity alone was no longer enough.
CEVA is the rare semiconductor company that does not need to manufacture a chip to collect from billions of them. Its bet is simple: as intelligence moves out of the cloud, the best tollbooth may be a small, power-efficient block of reusable silicon IP.

A doctoral detour became Movellus. Now its founder is putting nanosecond-scale awareness inside the chips carrying the AI boom - and making a case that better infrastructure begins on the silicon itself.
AI chips are getting better at arithmetic and worse at waiting. Baya Systems is building the configurable on-chip roads - and the software map - meant to keep data moving before a costly design becomes silicon.
Quadric is a semiconductor IP company that licenses the Chimera family of general-purpose neural processing units (GPNPUs) - a single, fully C++ programmable processor core that runs machine learning inference alongside classic DSP and control code in one unified architecture. Founded in 2016 by three engineers who previously built bitcoin computing hardware, Quadric aims to fix the fragmentation of on-device AI silicon: instead of a fixed-function neural accelerator that breaks whenever a new model appears, its cores scale from 1 to 864 TOPS and can adopt new networks - including large language models up to 30 billion parameters - through a software port rather than a chip respin.
MIPS is a San Jose-based semiconductor IP company with a 40-year heritage in RISC computing. After abandoning its own legacy architecture, MIPS reinvented itself around the open RISC-V instruction set and now builds compute subsystems for autonomous platforms across automotive, industrial, robotics, and edge AI markets. Its Atlas portfolio - spanning Sense, Think, Act, and Communicate building blocks - targets the low-latency, safety-critical demands of what the company calls Physical AI. In July 2025, GlobalFoundries announced a deal to acquire MIPS.
Synopsys is the quiet giant behind the world's chips. Its electronic design automation (EDA) software, semiconductor IP, and AI-driven design tools are used to design and verify nearly every advanced silicon chip on the planet - from smartphone processors to AI accelerators. Founded in 1986 by Aart de Geus and led today by CEO Sassine Ghazi, the Sunnyvale company turned the impossibly hard task of laying out billions of transistors into a software problem, and now layers AI on top of it. Its 2025 acquisition of simulation leader Ansys pushed it deeper into multiphysics and systems engineering.
Omni Design Technologies builds high-performance, ultra-low-power semiconductor IP - the data converters and mixed-signal blocks that move information between the analog and digital worlds. Its Swift family of ADCs, DACs and analog front-ends sits inside SoCs for AI infrastructure, 5G/6G, Wi-Fi 7, automotive lidar/radar, satellite links, and quantum control, fabricated on processes from 28nm down to advanced FinFET nodes.