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MARCH 2026 I I-CONNECT007 MAGAZINE 33 Alam: That's reflective of our overall strategy in that we rarely acquire a company or tech- nology and then only integrate it within our tools. Typically, we keep it standalone as well, because our focus is on how we can best help our clients. We don't want to make our solu- tions exclusive. We want to make it as integrated as possible within our tool chain, but we don't want to limit any flow from using technology like ASTER. Will, what does this mean to ASTER? Will Webb: It's great. The TestWay tool has always been about bridging test with design. For 30 some years, our flagship tool has done just that. With the integration into the Siemens tools, it becomes bet- ter and easier to continue doing that. It's getting designers and test engineers talking to each other. The test guys who know how to test a product are feeding that expertise into the design flow, very early in the process, which has great benefits. We've been talking about the integration into the overall workflow, but do you know how you'll extend the integration of TestWay now you're part of the Siemens family? Webb: One of our key abilities is electrical rule checking or electrical DFT. It's very important to understand how testable the board will be from an electrical perspective, not just mechanical DFT. The ability to analyze the design early in the process has always been critical to maximizing the benefit. With our integration with Siemens, the ability to run rule checks directly in the design en- vironment, such as Xpedition, offers tremendous benefits. That will save a lot of design cycles and back-and-forth changes between test and design, reducing the expense of design and test. ASTER has been extremely successful with mid-ti- er type customers. How does this open up oppor- tunities for your customers? Webb: ASTER has always been a small company, and that's always a marketing challenge. Being integrated with Siemens will help reach a larger market with our message. That should make it easier to reach out to a larger customer base to help bridge the design and test gap. This all sounds very exciting. What can we expect to see in the solution portfolio in the next couple of years between Siemens and ASTER and the other tools you're bringing together? Alam: We are at the very early stages of the inte- gration activities for ASTER, and in the mid stages of integration for Downstream, where we have de- fined the integrated product roadmap. We will be defining the integration specifics for ASTER over the next few months, but our overarching strategy is to maintain standalone products so that com- petitive flows can use them. While we did that with Downstream, there's also significant integration between Xpedition and Downstream, which you'll see in the next year or two. We have that same mindset with ASTER. We'll take their core product lines, solidify them as standalone tools, and integrate them into the Siemens family so all our customers can use them directly in our flow. Simultaneously, the work has started for R&D to implement technology inte- grations. I will be in France with the ASTER and Siemens R&D teams to map out how we will bring our technologies together. What functionality makes sense to shift left and include in our design tools? It doesn't make sense to put in everything, but there should be some light functionality for the engineers. We're not trying to replace the analysis that ASTER does later in the workflow because that has to happen. Instead, we're trying to avoid having to respin by including functionality early in the process to highlight shortfalls. These integration-type activities typically happen over a six-month period. First, the planning phase occurs, then execution can take one to two years before it's fully integrated into the Siemens envi- ronment and new features and benefits actually appear to the end user. That sounds like a good place to finish our conversation. Thank you all, and we look forward to seeing the integration process continue. I-CONNECT007 W i l l We b b ▼