The New Order of the Silicon Empire and the Value of EngineersAs of 2025, semiconductors stand at the center of global economic and technological hegemony. Once called the 'rice of industry,' semiconductors have now been elevated to the 'the 'brain of industry' and a core asset for national security.

The AI revolution has fundamentally transformed data center architecture, while the proliferation of autonomous driving and edge computing has elevated the difficulty and importance of silicon chip design to unprecedented levels.

Amidst this massive tectonic shift, the most dramatic transformation has been in the status and compensation structure of the 'semiconductor design engineers' who design and validate these systems.

Historically, hardware engineers were widely perceived to receive relatively conservative salary increases and limited stock options compared to software engineers.

Moreover, all companies ranked 1st to 8th globally by market capitalization are firms that directly design semiconductors.Reference: https://companiesmarketcap.com/usa/largest-companies-in-the-usa-by-market-cap/

https://www.vlsi.kr/semiconductor-design-engineer-salary-rankings/

https://www.vlsi.kr/

• Many of the core optimization problems in semiconductor design are NP-hard / NP-Complete / PSPACE-complete, so algorithms that guarantee an "optimal solution" are virtually unprofitable at scale (e.g., even if there are only 40 cases of 2, there are 1 trillion cases)
• This is why EDA tools are designed from the ground up to be heuristic + approximation + iterative improvement. This is not because "the tools suck," but because of the problem nature.
• AI/ML does not efficiently find "optimal" solutions to NP-hard problems. Instead, they actually benefit by guiding, automating, and narrowing the problem with models.

Electronic Design Automation sits at the heart of every modern chip, yet its tools cost a fortune. In this episode, we break down why EDA licenses are so expensive, how a few vendors came to dominate the market, and what that means for startups, engineers, and the future of semiconductor design.
https://www.vlsi.kr/analyzing-the-pricing-structure-of-eda-tools-synopsys-cadence-siemens-eda/