TAICHIP Industry Day 2026
October 9, 2026, Tallinn University of Technology, Estonia
Following the Industry Day held as part of the 1st TAICHIP Summer Workshop in 2025, the TAICHIP project organises a standalone Industry Day on Friday, October 9, 2026, at the Tallinn University of Technology. The day brings Estonian companies together with TAICHIP partners and invited speakers from the European chip design ecosystem. The programme covers what it takes to build a fabless semiconductor business, regional chip design competence centres, the state of open-source EDA and open PDKs, and MPW access from commercial to radiation-hardened technology nodes. The afternoon closes with a moderated discussion on the Estonian chip industry: where the real bottlenecks are, and which niches are worth pursuing.
The Industry Day is co-located with the IEEE Baltic Electronics Conference (BEC 2026), held in Tallinn on October 6-8. A TAICHIP Special Session is part of the BEC programme on October 8. See co-located activities below.
Participation is free of charge. Abstracts and speaker biographies are collected at the bottom of this page.
General Chair:
- Maksim Jenihhin, TalTech, Estonia
Programme Co-Chairs:
- Jaan Raik, TalTech / EIS, Estonia
- Artur Jutman, Testonica Lab / TalTech, Estonia
Programme
Friday, October 9, 2026 “Industry Day”
ICT-507 (5th floor), Akadeemia tee 15A, Tallinn
9:30 – 9:50 Welcome coffee
9:50 – 10:00 Welcome words and TAICHIP project overview
Maksim Jenihhin (TAICHIP project coordinator), TalTech, Tallinn, Estonia
10:00 – 10:40 So You Want to Start a Chip Company? Lessons from building, running and exiting a fabless semiconductor business
Michael Randt, founder of TRINAMIC Motion Control, Hamburg, Germany
Abstract and bio
10:40 – 11:20 Who Needs a Bavarian Chip-Design-Center?
Anton Klotz, Fraunhofer EMFT, Munich, Germany
Abstract and bio
11:20 – 11:40 Coffee Break
11:40 – 12:20 Open source chip design tools: status, opportunities and hurdles
Edmund Humenberger, Symbiotic EDA, Vienna, Austria
Abstract and bio
12:20 – 13:00 Invited talk (to be confirmed)
13:00 – 14:00 Lunch and Networking
14:00 – 14:40 IHP Open-PDK / Open-Tools, MPW and opportunities from commercial to radhard technology nodes
Fabian Vargas, IHP - Leibniz Institute for High Performance Microelectronics, Frankfurt (Oder), Germany
14:40 – 15:00 Title to be confirmed
Lauri Paal, Imaginal Microsystems, Estonia
15:00 – 15:20 Coffee Break
15:20 – 17:00 Estonian Chip Industry Discussion
Moderated by Artur Jutman, Testonica Lab / TalTech, and Jaan Raik, TalTech / EIS, Tallinn, Estonia
Opening talk: Overview of the Estonian chip design landscape in 2026, Andres Mellik, Metrosert Chip Competence Centre KIIP, Estonia
Discussion topics:
- Apart from the shortage of skilled personnel, what are the main showstoppers for Estonian companies that want to produce chips?
- Are there niche areas particularly suited to Estonian chip development, and if so, which ones?
17:00 – 17:10 Closing session
Maksim Jenihhin (TAICHIP project coordinator), TalTech, Tallinn, Estonia
19:00 – 21:30 Networking evening with drinks and snacks in Tallinn downtown (featuring discussions with Estonian companies and TAICHIP researchers)
Co-located activities, October 6-8
Several TAICHIP researchers are in Tallinn for the whole week, with technical meetings at TalTech from Sunday, October 4. The IEEE Baltic Electronics Conference runs from Tuesday, October 6 to Thursday, October 8 at the Nordic Hotel Forum in downtown Tallinn.
Tuesday, October 6, 2026
ICT-507AB (5th floor), Akadeemia tee 15A, Tallinn
10:00 – 11:00 Invited talk “Quality and reliability challenges for multi-die in the AI era”
Yervant Zorian (President of Synopsys Armenia), Synopsys
Abstract and bio
Nordic Hotel Forum, Tallinn downtown
BEC 2026 opens. Conference programme and registration: taltech.ee/en/bec2026
Thursday, October 8, 2026
Nordic Hotel Forum, Tallinn downtown
11:00 – 12:30 TAICHIP Special Session at BEC 2026
- (5 min) Welcome and introduction to the TAICHIP project, M. Jenihhin
- (20 min) “Workload-aware strategy for systolic array self-testing”, A. Bosio et al.
- (20 min) “Comparison of ring oscillators for on-chip monitoring of supply voltage and temperature”, M. Andjelkovic, A. Duta, M. Marjanovic, M. Stamos, J. Nedeljkovic, T. R. Lenka, Z. Peric, M. Dincic, J. Nikolic, D. Dankovic, T. Nikolic, G. Nikolic, C. Sotiriou, M. Taheri, A. Jutman, M. Jenihhin, F. Vargas, M. Krstic
- (20 min) “Depth or width? Soft-error resilience of early-exit DNNs”, R. M. Kodamanchili, N. Cherezova, M. Taheri, D. Bertozzi, M. Jenihhin
- (20 min) Title to be confirmed, K. Berszin, C. Wu, F. K. Gürkaynak, ETH Zürich
12:30 – 13:00 Invited talk “Silicon lifecycle management in memory IPs: from on-chip aging sensors and processing telemetry datasets to failure prediction”
Fabian Vargas, IHP, Frankfurt (Oder), Germany
14:00 – 16:00 TAICHIP Advisory Board and Management Committee meeting
(Restricted to invited participants, room at the BEC venue)
19:00 TAICHIP dinner
Abstracts and speaker biographies
So You Want to Start a Chip Company?
Lessons from building, running and exiting a fabless semiconductor business
Michael Randt, founder of TRINAMIC Motion Control
Abstract. Starting a semiconductor company sounds intimidating: long development cycles, expensive mistakes, global supply chains and competitors that are often orders of magnitude larger. Yet the fabless model has made it possible for relatively small teams to build globally relevant semiconductor businesses.
This talk follows the journey from the initial idea to a sustainable company, and eventually to an exit. It discusses how to identify problems that justify custom silicon, turn technology into products customers actually want, survive the first development cycles, build a scalable organization and manage the realities of manufacturing, application support, sales and financing.
It also looks at what ultimately makes a semiconductor company strategically valuable to an acquirer, and why an exit should usually be the consequence of building a strong business rather than the original objective. Drawing on lessons from building TRINAMIC Motion Control, the talk is intended to encourage engineers to think beyond designing chips, toward creating semiconductor companies.
Bio. Michael Randt is an electrical engineer and founder of TRINAMIC Motion Control, a Hamburg-based fabless semiconductor company, now part of Analog Devices. He studied motor design and control engineering at the Technical University of Braunschweig. As founder and CEO, he led TRINAMIC from its beginnings as a semiconductor start-up through international growth and ultimately its acquisition by Maxim Integrated, which later became part of Analog Devices. Today he is active as an entrepreneur and investor, and supports initiatives aimed at strengthening the semiconductor and electronics ecosystem in Estonia.
Who Needs a Bavarian Chip-Design-Center?
Anton Klotz, Fraunhofer EMFT
Abstract. In 2023 the Bavarian Ministry of Economic Affairs, Regional Development and Energy decided to spend 50 million EUR on a Bavarian Chip-Design-Center. The project is executed by three Bavarian Fraunhofer institutes and five Bavarian universities. Its aim is to secure the competitiveness of the local economy in chip design and microelectronics. The project rests on three pillars: education, supply chain and ecosystem. Although focused on Bavaria, BCDC is strongly connected with German and European initiatives in chip design, and it also provides services to companies in Europe and worldwide.
Bio. Anton Klotz studied technical computer science in Germany. After 20 years at a large US EDA company, he now works as a business developer at Fraunhofer EMFT and supports the Bavarian Chip-Design-Center as sales manager. He is also industry chair at the DATE conference and is deeply involved in the European chip design community.
Open source chip design tools: status, opportunities and hurdles
Edmund Humenberger, Symbiotic EDA
Abstract. Open-source chip design has moved from a fragmented set of academic and community tools toward a more practical ecosystem for education, prototyping and early-stage semiconductor development. For decades, integrated circuit design depended on proprietary EDA tools and confidential Process Design Kits, which created high barriers for universities, small research groups, startups and emerging semiconductor communities.
The recent release of open Process Design Kits such as SkyWater SKY130A, GlobalFoundries gf180mcuD and IHP-SG13G2 has changed this landscape by enabling public access to manufacturable semiconductor technologies. In parallel, initiatives such as Efabless, ChipFoundry, Tiny Tapeout, IEEE PICO, UNIC-CASS, ChipPractice and the IEEE Open Silicon Initiative have connected open design infrastructure with training, mentoring, community participation and tape-out opportunities.
Open PDKs and individual tools are not sufficient on their own. Practical chip design requires reproducible toolchains, maintained environments, workflow integration, verification infrastructure and user support. This presentation traces the past, present and future of open-source chip design tools, from early community-driven EDA development to today's managed open-source design environments. It discusses how platforms such as BlueGarden aim to turn open tools into reliable, Docker-based and CI/CD-enabled engineering environments for education, research and professional design work. The talk demonstrates recent tape-out successes and argues that the future of open-source chip design depends not only on more open technologies, but also on sustainable infrastructure, institutional support, fabrication pathways and educational models that let students and engineers move from theory to real manufactured chips.
Bio. Edmund Humenberger is CEO of Symbiotic EDA, a Vienna-based company developing and supporting open-source EDA workflows. His work focuses on making hardware development more accessible through open FPGA tools, reproducible chip-design environments, CI/CD-based hardware flows and managed open-source toolchains. Since 2014 he has been closely involved in the open-source silicon ecosystem, including the broader adoption of open PDKs such as SkyWater SKY130, which helped make it possible to manufacture chips designed with open-source tools. Symbiotic EDA has supported customers and partners across industry, academia and research, including IHP, Qualcomm and Huawei, as well as open-source chip-design initiatives connected to Google.
Quality and reliability challenges for multi-die in the AI era
Yervant Zorian, President of Synopsys Armenia, Chief Architect and Fellow at Synopsys
Invited talk, Tuesday, October 6, ICT-507AB
Abstract. Recent advances in artificial intelligence accelerators, automotive systems and high-performance computing in data centres have accelerated the adoption of advanced chiplets and 3DIC packaging technologies. This keynote presents current trends in high-end electronic systems and their need for advanced chiplets and 3DIC systems, and concentrates on the resiliency challenges and solutions for such systems. The focus is on optimizing chiplet silicon health using advanced solutions for managing the different stages of the silicon lifecycle: from chiplet design, to silicon debug in early bring-up, to self-test and repair during volume production for improving quality and yield at single-die and multi-die levels, to in-field power-on self-test addressing aging and degradation, to in-system periodic checking for reliability, functional safety and security, and finally to fault tolerance during mission mode to address in-field errors.
Bio. Dr. Yervant Zorian is the President of Synopsys Armenia, Chief Architect and Fellow at Synopsys. Formerly he was Vice President and Chief Scientist of Virage Logic, Chief Technologist at LogicVision, and a Distinguished Member of Technical Staff at AT&T Bell Laboratories. He is currently President of the IEEE Test Technology Technical Council (TTTC), founder and chair of the IEEE 1500 Standardization Working Group, Editor-in-Chief Emeritus of IEEE Design and Test of Computers, and an Adjunct Professor at the University of British Columbia. He served on the Board of Governors of the Computer Society and CEDA, was Vice President of the IEEE Computer Society, and was General Chair of the 50th Design Automation Conference and the 50th International Test Conference, as well as several other symposia and workshops. Dr. Zorian holds more than 40 US patents, has authored four books, published over 350 refereed papers and received numerous best paper awards. A Fellow of the IEEE since 1999, he received the Industrial Pioneer Award in 2005 for his contribution to BIST, the IEEE Hans Karlsson Award for diplomacy in 2006, the IEEE Distinguished Services Award for leading the TTTC, the IEEE Meritorious Award for outstanding contributions to EDA, the Republic of Armenia's National Medal of Science in 2014, and the IEEE TTTC Lifetime Contribution Award in 2022. A member of the Central Board of the Armenian General Benevolent Union (AGBU), Dr. Zorian is the Founding President of the Armenian Virtual College, President of the AGBU Silicon Valley Branch, and Chairman of the ArmTech Congress Program Committee. He is a foreign member of the National Academy of Sciences of the Republic of Armenia and a member of the Board of Trustees of the American University of Armenia. He received an MS in Computer Engineering from the University of Southern California, a PhD in Electrical Engineering from McGill University, and an MBA from the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania.
↑ Back to the co-located activities
Venue
The TAICHIP Industry Day 2026 will take place at the Department of Computer Systems, Tallinn University of Technology.
Department of Computer Systems (5th floor)
Akadeemia tee 15A,
Tallinn 12618
Estonia
Main contact
Maksim Jenihhin
+372 620 2262 (Office)
ICT-529, Akadeemia tee 15A, Tallinn
Organizing Committee
- Maksim Jenihhin,
This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. - Jaan Raik,
This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. - Artur Jutman,
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Secretary
- Kadri Mäger,
This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. - Katrin Tõemets,
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