India created Aadhaar, right? The UPI thing, right? And because of it, you were — I mean, a farmer who 10 years ago who did not even know how to use a cell phone, right? Who could not even open up a bank account can actually take payments, right? It's a beautiful infrastructure that has been created. But can the same farmer use AI, right, with agronomy, with all the physical AI models, say that here is a crop, right? If you get enough rain, enough sunlight, enough fertilizer, the crop will be a lot more powerful. So make AI real for the farmer. Make AI real for children.
We are here at the India Innovation Impact Summit. I'm here with Prithviraj Banerjee. Prith is here. He's one of the great leaders in terms of AI. Prith, we have a global audience that has been listening in who have not been able to come here. Tell them a little bit about yourself and why are you here at this summit.
Absolutely. So I am the senior vice president of innovation at Synopsys, and prior to that I used to be CTO at ANSYS. And in my role, I'm driving a lot of AI adoption of AI in the chip design and chips-to-systems area. So at this summit, I'm representing Synopsys to kind of talk about, share with the audience about what is the opportunity in this area at what we call silicon-defined, software-defined, and AI-enabled. That is the future of chips to systems. So when you look at this at a system like a car today, it has like 10 million lines of code on the car, but those lines of code run on an ECU, an embedded control unit, which is designed by Synopsys, traditional Synopsys. But there's software that is running on that, and that software is AI-powered. And then the car, as it goes around, you have to model the physics of the car, and that is done with the ANSYS simulation. So I'm incredibly excited about it. I have been talking about how AI is being used to speed up simulation, to make our tools easier to use. But there's just an incredible amount of excitement in India at this conference about the Global South, about how AI can be used responsibly.
That's fantastic, Prith. You have an incredible background from IIT Kharagpur to leading — I mean, you've been an entrepreneur. You've worked as a CTO of leading companies. Going from IIT Kharagpur there to coming back to seeing India from this perspective, what is your view of this journey? Of course. Tell our viewers a little bit about your journey, because it's probably — I've interviewed hundreds and hundreds of guests, but you have an incredible journey.
Tell our viewers a little bit.
So I consider myself very, very fortunate. So I did my undergraduate from IIT Kharagpur in India, and I was the President's Gold Medalist, which is I'm number one in my batch. And then I went to the US to do my PhD at the University of Illinois. And when I finished my PhD, I had chances to join various companies and various universities, but I stayed back at Illinois and had a wonderful 12 years at the University of Illinois, moving through the ranks, became a full professor, then went to Northwestern University, was a department head there, then a dean of engineering at the University of Illinois. So I spent 20 wonderful years in academia, working with more than 35 PhD students, 100, 300 papers. But what I lacked was I was doing all this research, but it was not really having an impact to society. So that's where I entered phase two in my career, where I did two startups like you, where I raised money from VCs, created a team, built a product, and sold both the companies — Exel chip to Xilinx and Binet chip to Quickstream Media. So, and then I entered the third phase in my career with the large corporates. And the first job I had was running HP Labs worldwide. HP at that time was a hundred billion dollar company, the largest computer company in the world. Ran that HP Labs, and then I became group CTO at ABB. I was based in Zurich in Switzerland. Then I was group CTO at Schneider Electric, based in France. And then I joined ANSYS as a group CTO seven years ago, and now I'm at Synopsys. So it's been a wonderful journey. But through that, what I've learned is how companies can practice innovation. And I have written a book called Innovation Factory, which is about that journey, about how innovation happens in academia, in startups, and the large corporate.
So people should go — is it on Amazon?
So this man knows a lot about innovation. As I said, his career arc is — I literally interviewed hundreds and hundreds of people. It's a very unique career arc. So please go and check out his book. Prith, briefly for our listeners who don't know, what is the logic behind Synopsys acquiring ANSYS? Tell us about that, because now it's a $35 billion company.
Thank you for the question. So what Synopsys used to be is a company for doing electronic design automation of chips. So when you look at a chip from say Nvidia or Intel or AMD or Broadcom, right? These used to maybe have a million transistors in the chip. Now they're having a billion transistors to up to a trillion transistors. The complexity of chips are increasing. And Synopsys had tools to help design those analog and digital chips. In addition, they had a very strong portfolio of what is called intellectual property, IP blocks. Right? So when you have a chip, you have IP blocks like an Ethernet controller or a HBM or whatever. So about 4 billion of Synopsys' business was the electronic design automation tools. 2 billion of the business was the IP blocks. And so that combination was 6 billion to allow companies like, as I said, the Nvidias, Intels, Broadcoms, Qualcomms to design these really complicated chips. But what has happened is these chips are not chips themselves. They are going into systems. When you look at a car, right, the car has all kinds of complicated electronic chips, and it is the software that is running on the car that is allowing you to run it autonomously, right? The Google, the Waymo cars that are going around the streets of San Francisco, right? They are being powered by software. So that software is running on the ECU, and that is doing the controls of that car. But then the car is working in the physical environment, right? It has external aerodynamics, right? So we have to worry about the wind pressures and so on. You can crash the car into something. It has electromagnetic interactions. So this, the physical part of the car or the airplane, was modeled by ANSYS. ANSYS was a leading system simulation company, about 3 billion in revenue. But we were only doing the system simulation part. As the industry is moving from chips to systems, these chips are going inside systems, you can actually optimize the entire system together holistically, like a software-defined vehicle or a software-defined airplane. For example, look at the Artemis mission that NASA is spending on a new aircraft to move. They are actually using the Synopsys and ANSYS software to do a full digital mission engineering. Here is the path from going from Florida all the way to the moon and back. And then we are modeling the full physics of the spacecraft and the software running on the spacecraft and the software running on the chip on the software. So this is the incredible opportunity of chips to systems. And so the combined company now, Synopsys is a 6 billion, ANSYS 3 billion, is a 9 billion, but is now going towards a $10 billion company. We have a market cap of only 100 billion. It's an incredible opportunity. And my role as SVP of innovation is to drive newer solutions between the two companies. Some examples are we are working on digital twins for semiconductor manufacturing. We are sitting here in India, and Prime Minister Modi talked about the investment in semiconductors, as there are fabs coming in from Tata Electronics, right, or Micron in India. There are fabs that are going in in Dholera in Gujarat, right? I was just talking to the gentleman from Tata Electronics yesterday at a reception. We have now the capability of designing, creating a digital twin of an entire semiconductor fab, or a digital twin of an entire space capsule system. So these are very, very interesting opportunities that we are working on.
And has real-life implications.
