Armenia can 长沙U币汇率稳定have a bigger share in the semiconductor industry: Siemens EDA Director

November 22, 2025  20:32

NEWS.am Tech interviewed Sasha Ahnen, AreaDirector for Central and Northern Europe at Siemens EDA, as part of the Silicon Mountains-2025 international technology summit held in Yerevan on November 15. He discussed, among other issues, the semiconductor market and Armenia's opportunities. The interview is presented below.

Siemens has a presence across multiple industries, from energy to healthcare. What are the major strategic areas Siemens is focusing on right now, particularly as the world shifts towards digitalization and sustainability?

I'm pleased that I can give a few insights to Siemens EDA. So I would say Siemens is shifting its gear from its industrial conglomerate to a technology company, and this shift already started years ago. So when you follow what Siemens has done with digital industry, they have built one of the largest software company in the world. So below digital industry, there is a sub company called Industry Software, where also Siemens EDA belongs to, we, as Siemens EDA are part of Digital Industries Software, and we have been acquired 2025 by Siemens.

What was the intent to acquire a highly specialized software company doing design software for electronics? The intent was to have a digital twin. So Siemens had already a strong presence in software, in life cycle, in mechanical design. But if you think about a product, a product is not only containing of mechanic and software. There is a huge proportion, which is called electronics. And Siemens vision, nearly 10 years back was to create a real digital twin to enable companies to in early stages, see what they can achieve and how their product would behave if they would apply certain features, functions, methodologies.

We, as Siemens, strongly believe that the future will be a lot more digital in terms of the product development. So physical prototypes will only come in a very late stage. And that's why we are very much focused on the digitalization of this world, and Siemens is heavily investing into that. So you might have seen that we just announced the planned acquisition of Altair Engineering, which is further strengthening on the one hand, the EDA portfolio, where we will get additional simulation capabilities as well as scheduling capabilities, but also a lot of mechanical simulations for the mechanical world of a product. That's our answer to the industry. We are the leader for digitalization, especially if it comes to digital prototyping, where we say we really shift left the development. 

With the rise of AI and machine learning, how is Siemens incorporating these technologies into its products and services?

At Siemens, we have corporate AI teams. So we have over 1500 AI engineers within Siemens, which are focusing on how we bring AI technology into the products, and then, more specifically, to what Siemens EDA is doing, we really heavily leverage the technology which is developed in the corporate functions, and include them into our products.

Our main focus as Siemens EDA is efficiency gain. AI technology is applied in the first step everywhere, where we can achieve more efficiency, and on the other hand, we are creating completely new approaches to resolve problems. So for example, if you wanted to simulate a large analog circuit, in the past, there was a lot of brute force methods to understand how the failure distribution over a life cycle would be. And we with Solido Solutions, it really invented a technology where we apply smart AI and machine learning technologies to shorten the time we need to come to the result.

AI is fully deployed, I would say in many areas, there's a lot of development ongoing, and our aim is really to make engineers more efficient and shorten design cycles and being able to design more and more complex technology.

Siemens is attending the Silicon Mountains summit, which brings together tech leaders and innovators. What are your key objectives for participating in this event, and how does Siemens plan to leverage this summit to strengthen its engagement with Armenia’s tech ecosystem?

We are very eager to engage with new companies, startups as well as well established companies. That's why we are here. We actually want to help countries to establish an ecosystem and enable the next wave of growth, the next wave of new-founded companies, which are then growing. And I think you have seen in the in the panel discussion, how multinationals get attracted to certain sites. It always starts with an innovative idea born in a startup growing to a reasonable size and then being acquired by maybe being acquired by a large enterprise.

And what we really would like to do here is enablement. So we would like to enable the Armenian industry to get a huge share of the semiconductor cake. And with that, we are helping startups, for example, with access to licenses. We are helping startups to qualify their ideas within the larger Siemens product portfolio, give them an understanding if their idea is going in the right direction, has the right ready level to being really developed. So our idea is really to help the ecosystem and help the Armenian economy.