2026 Keynotes

Abstract: AI is transforming our society, but its future depends on a new generation of chips: powerful, energy-efficient, secure, and close to the edge. Bringing AI closer to the user is no longer only a performance goal — it is essential for privacy, sustainability, and technological sovereignty. This keynote explores the two-way revolution between AI and semiconductors. On one side, novel AI chips and brain-inspired computing can enable ultra-efficient training and inference at the edge. On the other side, AI is becoming essential for designing future chips, especially as scaling approaches the sub-3 nm era and physical and reliability limits become profoundly critical. The keynote also addresses a major bottleneck: the growing talent gap. Through MACHT-AI — Munich Center for AI Chips, we show how training the next generation of engineers in advanced chip technologies is essential for Europe’s future in AI hardware.

The future of AI needs better chips. The future of chips needs AI. And both need talent.

Abstract: We will explore what it really takes to verify a complex ASIC when perfection is off the table. Verification is often presented as a discipline that, with the right methodologies and tools, can be driven all the way to completeness - yet the reality of a scale-up tells a different story, where complex SoCs, ambitious time-to-market, and limited resources force us to make sensible trade-offs.

Drawing on that experience, we will examine where verification effort truly pays off and where the pursuit of completeness delivers diminishing returns, and we will ask the practical question at the heart of every project: what are the best bang-for-the-buck ways to achieve reliable verification?

Join us as we reframe verification not as a quest for perfection, but as the art of making deliberate, confident engineering choices.