Physics Simulation for Chip Design Used to Take Days. This AI Does It in Seconds.

This week we sat down with Hardik Kabaria, co-founder and CEO of Vinci, to demo the AI platform making physics simulation accessible to any engineer building hardware. A chip tape-out used to cost millions of dollars and take months. Thermal analysis that should take seconds was waiting days for a specialist with a PhD. Vinci is compressing all of that into minutes — and making it accessible to anyone on the design team, not just the simulation expert.We also got into why AI image and video generation still has not produced a Netflix movie, what has to change before it does, and how AI getting into hardware design raises the stakes around IP and watermarking in ways nobody is talking about yet.

We cover:

What Vinci does — making physics simulation accessible to anyone building hardware

Why a chip tape-out costs millions and takes months and how AI is compressing that cycle

How Vinci lets engineers get thermal and physics answers in seconds instead of days

The existing workflow — designers, performance evaluators, and manufacturers rarely even work in the same team

How simulation software went from requiring PhDs to something any engineer can access

The digital twin concept — running physics experiments in software before touching physical prototypes

Why the semiconductor and data center cooling market is the starting point

News — AI image and video generation still has not crossed the quality schism

Why there are no AI-generated movies on Netflix yet even though the models exist

How AI getting into hardware design changes the stakes around IP and watermarking

The parallel between language models democratizing reasoning and physics models democratizing simulation

If you are building hardware, working in semiconductors, or want to understand where AI is going beyond software, this episode is for you.

Find Hardik:

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/hardikkabaria

Twitter: x.com/hardikk13

Find Vinci:

Website: getvinci.ai

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/company/vinciphysics

Company Twitter: x.com/VinciPhysics

New episodes every Friday at BuiltThisWeek.com

TIMESTAMPS

[00:00] Intro

[01:14] Meet Hardik — co-founder and CEO of Vinci

[02:06] What Vinci does — making physics accessible for hardware builders

[03:24] How simulation has worked in hardware for decades

[04:33] The digital and physical world of experiments

[05:47] Getting physics answers in seconds instead of days

[06:28] How Vinci fits into the existing hardware design workflow

[08:10] The tape-out problem — millions of dollars and months per iteration

[10:00] Live demo — thermal simulation for semiconductor design

[13:00] Who is using Vinci and what problems they are solving

[15:30] The language model analogy — democratizing physics reasoning

[17:00] News — AI image generation and the quality schism

[19:30] Why there are no AI movies on Netflix yet

[21:00] AI getting into hardware and the IP watermarking problem

[23:50] The regulations and guardrails that will follow

[26:05] Where to find Hardik and Vinci

[26:43] Wrap up

#AI #Physics #Semiconductors #HardwareDesign #Vinci #ChipDesign #BuildWithAI #BuiltThisWeek #AIHardware #Simulation