BGF has completed a follow-on investment in Mach42, an AI-driven company developing technology to speed up analog circuit simulation for semiconductor design, to help scale its engineering and business development teams and accelerate commercial adoption.
Demand for ever more powerful and efficient chips is increasing the complexity of semiconductor design, creating a need for faster and more accurate verification tools. One of the main pressure points is in analog circuit verification, where the current approaches massively lag the market need: enhanced testing allows engineers to determine whether circuits will perform accurately and reliably before they are manufactured, saving both time and money.
Mach42 uses advanced machine learning to create high-accuracy models that help engineering teams reduce development time, lower computational costs and integrate faster simulation into existing electronic design automation workflows. The company is initially focused on power management devices, where efficient simulation can improve design quality and reduce design cycle times which result in millions of dollars of cost savings. However, the wider analog chip market is widely estimated to be around $100bn and operates across multiple device classes which could also benefit from Mach42’s world-leading technology.
Tim Haynes, Chair of Mach42, said: “The EDA industry has very high expectations of tool performance, having relied on highly accurate simulation for decades. Mach42 makes new agentic approaches to analog chip design viable.
“Over the next two years we expect the EDA industry to see a surge in compute demand as agentic design flows take hold. Our tools work hand in hand with SPICE simulators, dramatically reducing design cycle times and improving IC design quality. We are successfully demonstrating our modelling capability on very large power management devices, and power management is our focus going forward.”
