The recent trends of VLSI design are more towards System on Chip designs. The scope of front end design verification has also increased from pure functional simulations to Formal verification, FPGA and other Emulation, Hardware and Software Co verification, etc.
With the recent emergence of Artificial intelligence, the Genetic algorithm and it's implementation towards VLSI Design opens up huge scope for Front end. So there are lots of opportunities for a front end design engineer in IP based design and System on Chip design areas.