Reflections from the Silicon Horizon Last Thursday, Berkeley SkyDeck and Synopsys Inc brought together founders, investors, operators, and researchers for “The Silicon Horizon: The Next Decade for the Chip Industry.” It was energizing to help emcee a conversation that stepped back from the next node or the next funding round and focused on where this industry is really heading. What stood out most wasn’t any single prediction, but the consistency of the message across very different vantage points. We’re entering a decade where progress is less about brute-force scaling and more about how intelligently we design, integrate, and deploy silicon—from architecture and memory to packaging and system-level thinking, especially for AI-driven workloads. For startups in particular, speed to tape-out is becoming existential, not optional. And just as important, no one advances alone. The strongest insights reinforced how tightly coupled this ecosystem has become—academia, EDA and cloud platforms, foundries, and capital all moving together, increasingly organized around specific problems and workloads rather than general-purpose chips. It feels like a moment where collaboration and alignment matter more than sheer scale. Thank you to the speakers and panelists for sharing their perspectives so candidly: Borivoje Nikolic (UC Berkeley) Sridhar Panchapakesan (Synopsys) Krste Asanovic (SiFive) Ravi Subramanian (Synopsys) Vijay R. (Mayfield) Paul Rousseau (TSMC) And many thanks to Chon Tang for guiding a thoughtful panel discussion. It was great to see so many thought leaders join us and help make the event what it was. Looking forward to continuing these conversations as the silicon horizon comes into clearer focus. #SiliconHorizon #Semiconductors #ChipStartups #EDA #AIHardware #BerkeleySkyDeck #Synopsys
Silicon Horizon: Chip Industry Trends and Collaboration
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