Can We Trust the Chips in Our Cars? Verification as the Foundation of Safe Automotive Silicon

Every modern vehicle relies on billions of transistors making safety-critical decisions in milliseconds yet we rarely ask how we prove that silicon behaves. Verification is the discipline that earns that trust, and it’s being reshaped by rising complexity, functional-safety demands, and the arrival of AI into the engineering loop. Drawing on automotive SoC verification experience, this talk explains for leaders across the value chain why verification is now both the bottleneck and the enabler for trustworthy systems, how AI-assisted methods are changing the economics of assurance, and what the UK ecosystem must prioritise in tooling and talent to keep pace.

Biography

Abinaya is a design verification engineer specialising in UVM-based verification, clock-domain-crossing, and functional-safety methodologies for automotive system-on-chip designs. She is the founder of SiliconDV, an educational platform that has reached 10,000+ followers and mentored 100+ engineers worldwide, tackling the verification skills gap. Her work spans coverage-driven verification, memory error-injection methodology, and AI-assisted verification workflows. She serves as a peer reviewer for IEEE journals and an awards reviewer for the Design Automation Conference’s Women in Tech program, and has presented at international design and verification conferences. She is passionate about making advanced verification knowledge accessible across the global semiconductor community.