The Chip Insider®–1 Year after Trump’s Liberation Day. Synopsys Converge.

Summary: Trump’s Liberation Day Anniversary:

It’s been a year since President Trump imposed massive tariffs on imports to the United States. Some were as high as 50%. At one point China was at 125%. The average effective tariff was just over 20%. These are the highest levels since the 1930s. By May TechInsights had forecasted a stall in IC sales, with a sequential decline of 2% in 4Q25. At the time it looked dire, with most smartphones and other electronic devices being made in China. While Secretary of Commerce, Howard Lutnick, had insisted these early tariffs would not be lowered, the effect of falling stock prices and treasuries forced a reversal. By the end of 2025 the effective rate had been cut in half … This helped to engineer a soft landing of 0.7% 4Q25 GDP growth in the US. The weak growth was attributed to weak exports, consumption, and the government shutdown. Inflation grew from a low of 2% in Q2 to around 3% in 4Q, with the GDP price deflator at 3.7%. Arguably, they reproved most of the 1930’s economic theory lessons about tariffs. As for semiconductor manufacturing, tariffs failed to bring it back to the US last year… The good news is the story is similar to most past disasters… tariffs had little impact on the semiconductor market…

Synopsys Converge: A new dawn for EDA… SNUG is now Converge:

When a company changes a flagship brand, as Synopsys did this year in changing the name of its conference from SNUG to Converge, it’s always a warning signal to look deeper… Sassine Ghazi, President and CEO of Synopsys, gave this year’s keynote and he definitely delivered. His new word couplings were “simultaneous disruption” and "where bits meet atoms." Sassine sees the linear disruption of the past shifting left to become … as physical AI comes to bear. As for the digital to physical AI transition, he describes this as the interface "where bits meet atoms." Physical AI, or robots with AI brains, is expected to be transformational… Two other strategic concepts introduced after Nvidia’s Jensen Huang came on stage are “Principle algorithms versus AI algorithms” and the “data flywheel.” Jensen put forth the idea that…

“Those that fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.”
— Winston Churchill