IN2FAB's Timothy Regan—an analog/mixed-signal and EDA veteran whose path runs through Texas Instruments and Valid Logic—used a SemiWiki interview to underline a corner of the industry the market keeps ignoring: tooling for analog design and cross-foundry migration.
The strategic point is timing. Nearly every headline dollar today flows toward leading-edge digital logic and AI accelerators, yet the physical world still runs on analog and mixed-signal parts: power management, sensing, RF, automotive and industrial control. These designs live on mature nodes, resist automation, and depend on scarce senior engineers. That combination makes them a structural bottleneck. When a company needs to move a proven analog block to a second foundry or a different process—for cost, capacity, or geopolitical hedging—the work is manual, slow, and error-prone. EDA that automates layout translation and fab transfer directly attacks that friction, turning supply flexibility from a multi-quarter project into something closer to a routine engineering task.
Globally, this maps onto the dominant theme of the decade: de-risking concentration. Foundry diversification, node availability, and second-sourcing are now board-level concerns. Migration tooling is the unglamorous enabler that makes those strategies executable rather than aspirational.
For Japan, the relevance is unusually direct. Japanese firms hold real strength in analog, power, and automotive-grade silicon, precisely the categories where design portability and mature-node capacity dominate the economics. As foundry investment reshapes domestic supply, the ability to retarget existing IP across processes without redesigning from scratch protects both margins and lead times. It also cushions a demographic reality Japanese design teams feel acutely: the pool of veteran analog engineers is shrinking, and automation that captures their expertise reduces key-person risk.
The caution for local decision-makers is to treat analog EDA and migration capability as core supply-chain infrastructure, not a niche procurement line. In a fragmenting market, the firms that can move designs fastest between fabs will negotiate from strength—while those locked to a single process will keep paying the concentration premium.
