Cadence AuraStack AI agent cuts design time in half, delivers 15X productivity boost for engineers

Cadence's AuraStack agent melds AI with HPC to speed PCB, advanced packaging design

How AI will change the way scientific computing is done remains an open question. One relies on ultra-precise double-precision mathematics, while the other is perfectly happy working with 4 bits. On the surface, the two are diametrically opposed, two extremes of a spectrum we call high-performance computing (HPC) -- and yes, whether you like it or not, AI is HPC. However, the latest AI offering from Cadence Design Systems, one of the biggest names in industrial HPC, offers a glimpse of how high- and low-precision compute could not just coexist, but work together to solve bigger and more complex problems faster and with fewer resources. Announced on Wednesday, Cadence's AuraStack is an agentic AI system built to assist electrical engineers to design and test printed circuit boards (PCBs), or conduct advanced packaging design and testing -- two tasks that have historically relied on highly precise simulations. AI is definitely a big piece of what Cadence has built; however the company isn't replacing these tools with hallucination-prone AI models. Instead, AuraStack is a bit like Anthropic's Claude Code or OpenAI's Codex, but rather than writing, compiling, debugging, and running C or Rust in a sandbox, Cadence's latest agent is designed to orchestrate its existing test and simulation suites. "AI is amplifying the value of our engineering products and technologies," Michael Jackson, CVP of Cadence's system design and analysis division, told The Register. In other words, the AI model -- we're told AuraStack integrates with a wide range of open and proprietary models -- functions as a natural language interface capable of planning and orchestrating complex multi-step circuit design and testing workflows that run at higher precision using CPUs, GPUs, and other accelerators. "For example, if I'm going to check and fix the IR reliability, I need to identify the power management components. I need to create a simulation-ready power tree, and then I need to do the simulation, and then I need to provide feedback to the designer," Jackson said. Cadence's existing product stack already automates many of these processes. The problem, Jackson explains, is that a PCB or package design often requires completing thousands of tasks throughout its development. "Sixty-five percent of an engineer's day is spent navigating and dealing with a lot of these tasks," he said. By orchestrating that scutwork, Jackson claims that AuraStack can deliver a 15x boost to productivity by letting the designer focus on design and engineering decisions rather than the individual tasks. These gains are enough that several large players in the electronics space, including Nvidia, have already signed up for the service. Cadence isn't just melding AI with HPC for chip design or advanced packaging. The engineering software provider has built similar agents for digital and analog chip design. The idea of using low precision compute to run AI models that orchestrate more precise single- and double-precision physics simulations isn't new. Nvidia is one of the biggest champions of this approach, which makes sense seeing as its GPUs aren't limited to training and running AI models, even if that's what most folks are buying them for these days. Earlier this year, we explored how researchers at the Department of Energy's Sandia National Laboratories used AI agents to develop and test new hypotheses. They described the system as a self-driving lab. However, those tests, while similar in concept to what Cadence is doing with AuraStack, didn't use LLMs and instead used more mature architectures like variational auto-encoders. But given the success of code assistants, it's not hard to imagine agent harnesses similar to AuraStack being used to automate lab equipment, perform simulations, and then iterate on the results, enabling scientists to continue their research even after they've nodded off for the night. ®

Cadence rolls out AI agent to speed circuit board, chip packaging design

SAN FRANCISCO, July 15 (Reuters) - Cadence Design Systems (CDNS.O), opens new tab on Wednesday launched an artificial-intelligence "super agent" that designs printed circuit boards and chip packages, extending the company's push to automate more of the engineering process. The tool, called AuraStack, lets engineers describe their goals in plain language, then plans and carries out the work using Cadence's existing software tools to lay out and virtually test circuit designs. Cadence said Nvidia (NVDA.O), opens new tab chips will accelerate the AI work. Cadence said AuraStack can cut time to market by ⁠up to half and lift productivity on individual tasks as much as 15-fold. The AI agent for circuit boards and chip packaging follows similar offerings earlier this year to help speed up the design of chips themselves. In a demonstration, Cadence showed an engineer using the tool to rework a 5G smartphone's circuit board to build a cheaper version for a new market. It recommended consolidating components for a 28% cost saving, then found a lower-cost power-management chip that ⁠worked with circuit board design. "The bottleneck isn't automation. It's really engineering intelligence," Michael Jackson, Cadence's corporate vice president and general manager for system design and analysis, said in an interview, referring to the reasoning across cost and performance trade-offs that the ⁠system is designed to handle. Cadence named Nvidia, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co and Schneider Electric among early users. Jackson said Cadence customers can pair AuraStack with the AI model of ⁠their choice, including OpenAI's ChatGPT, Google's Gemini or Anthropic's Claude, or open-source models. Pricing will follow a consumption-based model based on how hard the ⁠AI models work, and still require Cadence's underlying tools, Jackson said. AuraStack will be available this year, with the rollout to be completed in September, Jackson said. Reporting by Stephen Nellis in San Francisco; Editing by Sanjeev Miglani Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles., opens new tab

Cadence Design Systems: Cadence rolls out AI agent to speed circuit board, chip packaging design

The tool, called AuraStack, lets engineers describe their goals in plain language, then plans and carries out the work using Cadence's ⁠existing ⁠software tools to lay out and virtually test circuit designs. Cadence said Nvidia chips will accelerate the AI work. Cadence Design Systems on Wednesday launched an artificial-intelligence "super agent" that designs printed circuit boards and chip packages, extending the company's push to automate more of the engineering process. The tool, called AuraStack, lets engineers describe their goals in plain language, then plans and carries out the work using Cadence's ⁠existing ⁠software tools to lay out and virtually test circuit designs. Cadence said Nvidia chips will accelerate the AI work. Cadence said AuraStack can cut time to market by up to half and lift productivity on individual tasks as much as 15-fold. The AI agent for circuit boards and chip packaging follows similar offerings earlier this year to ⁠help speed up the design of chips themselves. In a demonstration, Cadence showed an engineer using the tool to rework a ⁠5G smartphone's circuit board to build a cheaper version for a new market. It recommended consolidating components for a 28% cost saving, then found a lower-cost power-management chip that worked with circuit board design. "The bottleneck isn't automation. It's really engineering intelligence," Michael Jackson, Cadence's corporate vice president and general manager for system design and analysis, said in an interview, referring to the reasoning across cost and performance trade-offs that the system is designed to handle. Cadence named Nvidia, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co and Schneider Electric ⁠among early users. Jackson said Cadence customers can pair AuraStack with the AI model of their choice, including OpenAI's ChatGPT, Google's Gemini or Anthropic's Claude, or open-source models. Pricing will follow a consumption-based model based on how hard the AI models work, and still require Cadence's underlying tools, Jackson said. AuraStack will be available this year, with the rollout to be completed in September, Jackson said.

Cadence's AuraStack AI Stack Addresses The PCB & Advanced Packaging Bottleneck That Is Eating 65% Of Engineers' Time, With NVIDIA & TSMC Already Deploying It

Cadence has announced its new AuraStack AI Super Agent, which aims to solve PCB & advanced packaging bottlenecks by leveraging Agentic AI. Cadence's AuraStack AI Super Agent Brings The World's First Agentic AI Platform To PCB & Advanced Packaging Manufacturing, Solving One of The Biggest Bottlenecks That The Tech Industry Faces Right Now The Cadence AuraStack AI Super Agent runs on the company's Allegro AI Studio and is the first Agentic AI platform that is built for PCB and Advanced Packaging design. The stack allows PCB designers to take planned systems into a final product through a single AI-native environment. Powered by the NVIDIA Blackwell and CUDA-X architecture, the Cadence AuraStack AI Super Agent coordinates domain-specific AI agents across planning, implementation, and tightly integrated multiphysics analysis domains to compress the system-design cycle through the manufacturing stages. Cadence today introduced the AuraStack AI Super Agent, the world's first agentic AI platform for printed circuit boards (PCB) and advanced packaging design. With 65% of engineers' time consumed by abstract tasks, the bottleneck isn't automation -- it's engineering intelligence. AuraStack AI Super Agent has multiple benefits. It boosts the time-to-market by up to 2x with a 15x increase in productivity and multiphysics-driven quality; it unifies separate engineering teams around a shared, multi-physics-aware design environment and advanced early and continuous multiphysics co-optimization to reduce late-stage rework and costly design iterations. Limiting expensive respins is also a major advantage that you get with the AI-powered stack, and with its product-level optimization for advanced packaging solutions, you get faster manufacturing. The AuraStack AI Super Agent's key benefits include: * Accelerating time to market by 2X, with 15X productivity and multiphysics-driven quality -- automating complex tasks, expanding design exploration. * Unifying separate engineering teams around a shared, multiphysics-aware design environment with a single source of truth across domains. * Advancing early and continuous multiphysics co-optimization to reduce late-stage rework and costly design iterations. Unifies Cadence multiphysics signoff solutions, such as Celsius Thermal Solver, Clarity 3D Solver for 3D-EM, MSC Nastran and Marc Linear and Non-Linear Finite Element Analysis Solvers for mechanical analysis, and Sigrity X Platform for signal and power integrity. * Limiting expensive respins by identifying system issues earlier in development. * Enabling product-level optimization, including co-optimization with advanced packaging approaches. Cadence is working with multiple industry leaders to deploy AuraStack AI Super Agent to their workflows to address advanced IC packaging and PCB design challenges. NVIDIA is using it to automate and optimize increasingly complex system design workflows for its engineering teams. TSMC is also using the Agentic AI stack to accelerate advanced packaging implementation by leveraging AI-driven automation, enabling a timely design convergence for increasingly complex multi-die systems. NVIDIA x Cadence "The scale and complexity of modern AI infrastructure demands a new design approach," said Tim Costa, vice president and general manager of computational engineering at NVIDIA. "NVIDIA's collaboration with Cadence is advancing AI-powered engineering workflows that accelerate design convergence and innovation across the industry. The Cadence AuraStack AI Super Agent and the Millennium M2000 Supercomputer deliver up to 20X faster multiphysics performance, giving our engineers the capability to tackle the most demanding design challenges and bring the next generation of AI infrastructure to life." TSMC x Cadence "As advanced packaging complexity grows, customers need new levels of automation to achieve timely design convergence," said Aveek Sarkar, director of the Ecosystem and Alliance Management Division at TSMC. "Our long-standing partnership with Open Innovation Platform® (OIP) ecosystem partners like Cadence to deliver advanced package design and verification solutions for TSMC 3DFabric® technologies helps customers accelerate the realization of next-generation multi-die systems for AI and high-performance computing applications. Through our multi-year collaboration on substrate auto routing, we are already enabling customers to boost productivity by 100X while delivering quality of results similar to manual routing." With the release of the AuraStack AI Super Agent, Cadence becomes the world's only provider of an Agentic AI solution stack that spans the full electronic system design flow, from digital & analog silicon design to advanced packaging, PCB design, and more. These solutions will help address the limitations that the advanced packaging and PCB manufacturing firms currently face. Follow Wccftech on Google to get more of our news coverage in your feeds.

Cadence Introduces AuraStack AI Super Agent, the World's First Agentic AI Platform for PCB and Advanced Packaging

Running on Allegro AI Studio, the AuraStack AI Super Agent delivers up to 2X faster time to market, 15X higher productivity and multiphysics-driven quality across the industry's only silicon-to-system agentic AI stack Cadence today introduced the AuraStack™ AI Super Agent on Cadence® Allegro® AI Studio, the world's first agentic AI platform for printed circuit board (PCB) and advanced packaging design, taking designers from system planning to final product in a single AI-native environment. The Cadence AuraStack AI Super Agent, accelerated by NVIDIA Blackwell and NVIDIA CUDA-X, coordinates domain-specific AI agents across planning, implementation and tightly integrated multiphysics analysis domains to compress the system-design cycle through manufacturing. With the AuraStack AI Super Agent, Cadence is now the only provider with agentic AI solutions spanning the full electronic system design flow, from digital and analog silicon design, advanced packaging, through to PCB design, building on its ChipStack™, InnoStack™ and ViraStack™ AI Super Agents. With the AuraStack AI Super Agent, Cadence is now the only provider with agentic AI solutions spanning the full electronic system design flow, from digital and analog silicon design, advanced packaging, through to PCB design, building on its ChipStack™, InnoStack™ and ViraStack™ AI Super Agents. "The next era of AI infrastructure -- spanning data centers, automotive, aerospace and physical AI -- will be defined not only by silicon, but by the systems that connect, power and cool it," said Michael Jackson, corporate vice president of R&D for System Design and Analysis at Cadence. "As hyperscale data centers deploy massive AI clusters and other industries advance increasingly intelligent, high-performance systems, engineering teams face growing complexity in PCB and advanced package design. Agentic AI orchestration, combined with trusted EDA and SDA tools, enables customers to move from manual iteration to intelligent, automated design realization." Agentic AI for Packaging and PCB Design Building on the same architecture as Cadence's ChipStack AI Super Agent, agentic AI is combined with principled simulation and optimization tools, leveraging a mental model of the design intent, to automate and orchestrate the design exploration, realization and signoff. The AuraStack AI Super Agent brings together automation and optimization for system planning, constraints management, physical structure definition, IP creation and reuse, place and route, design for manufacturability and multiphysics analysis across Cadence's system design and analysis portfolio. It introduces a unified, AI-driven multiphysics foundation that concurrently models and optimizes electrical, thermal and mechanical behavior -- including SI/PI, thermal, mechanical stress, drop, vibration and fatigue analysis -- within a closed-loop environment, enabling earlier tradeoff evaluation and product-level optimization across the entire design flow. This continuous multiphysics feedback loop enables real-time design convergence, reducing late-stage surprises and improving overall system reliability. The AuraStack AI Super Agent's key benefits include: * Accelerating time to market by 2X, with 15X productivity and multiphysics-driven quality -- automating complex tasks, expanding design exploration. * Unifying separate engineering teams around a shared, multiphysics-aware design environment with a single source of truth across domains. * Advancing early and continuous multiphysics co-optimization to reduce late-stage rework and costly design iterations. Unifies Cadence multiphysics signoff solutions, such as Celsius™ Thermal Solver, Clarity™ 3D Solver for 3D-EM, MSC Nastran™ and Marc™ Linear and Non-Linear Finite Element Analysis Solvers for mechanical analysis, and Sigrity™ X Platform for signal and power integrity. * Limiting expensive respins by identifying system issues earlier in development. * Enabling product-level optimization, including co-optimization with advanced packaging approaches. Industry Leaders Advancing Agentic AI with Cadence Cadence is collaborating with industry leaders to deploy AuraStack AI Super Agent workflows for real-world advanced IC packaging and PCB design challenges. NVIDIA is using Cadence to help automate and optimize increasingly complex system design workflows for its engineering teams. "The scale and complexity of modern AI infrastructure demands a new design approach," said Tim Costa, vice president and general manager of computational engineering at NVIDIA. "NVIDIA's collaboration with Cadence is advancing AI-powered engineering workflows that accelerate design convergence and innovation across the industry. The Cadence AuraStack AI Super Agent and the Millennium M2000 Supercomputer deliver up to 20X faster multiphysics performance, giving our engineers the capability to tackle the most demanding design challenges and bring the next generation of AI infrastructure to life." Cadence is partnering with TSMC to help customers accelerate advanced package implementation through AI-driven automation, enabling timely design convergence for increasingly complex multi-die systems. "As advanced packaging complexity grows, customers need new levels of automation to achieve timely design convergence," said Aveek Sarkar, director of the Ecosystem and Alliance Management Division at TSMC. "Our long-standing partnership with Open Innovation Platform® (OIP) ecosystem partners like Cadence to deliver advanced package design and verification solutions for TSMC 3DFabric® technologies helps customers accelerate the realization of next-generation multi-die systems for AI and high-performance computing applications. Through our multi-year collaboration on substrate auto routing, we are already enabling customers to boost productivity by 100X while delivering quality of results similar to manual routing." Socionext is leveraging Cadence to accelerate the automation and optimization of increasingly complex semiconductor package and PCB design workflows. "AI-driven agents are set to transform IC package and PCB design by automating SI, PI and thermal workflows and enabling generative design," said Iwasaki Toshifumi, lead design execution leading unit, Global Leading Group at Socionext Inc. "This acceleration allows our engineers to focus on higher-value work like architecture exploration, margin optimization, and multiphysics tradeoffs, while capabilities such as automated routing and chip-package-board co-design accelerate convergence and reduce manual effort." FORVIA HELLA continues to advance intelligent, sustainable mobility solutions that will define the future of automotive technology. "Working closely with Cadence has fundamentally changed the way FORVIA HELLA develops advanced automotive electronics. Using AI-assisted placement technology, a task involving the placement of 300 components that previously took up to four days can now be completed in just four minutes," said Sven Hoenecke, president & CEO, Electronics NSA at FORVIA HELLA. "This step change in productivity allows our engineers to evaluate more design alternatives, optimize layouts earlier in the development process, and accelerate the development of innovative products without compromising quality. By automating repetitive work, our teams can focus more time on solving complex engineering challenges and bringing new technologies to market faster." Schneider Electric is collaborating with Cadence to apply AI-driven design automation and engineering expertise to accelerate electronic design workflows and scale institutional knowledge across engineering teams. "At Schneider Electric, we see AI as much more than a productivity tool. Our collaboration with Cadence has demonstrated the potential of AI to accelerate design activities and improve engineer efficiency," said Daniel Gheno, senior vice president, Innovation and Technology EM at Schneider Electric. "The next frontier is to combine design automation with engineering expertise, enabling companies to capture decades of know-how and make robust design decisions available to every engineer. We believe this is where AI can truly transform electronic design."

Cadence Introduces AuraStack AI Super Agent, the World?s First Agentic AI Platform for PCB and Advanced Packaging

Cadence introduced the AuraStack AI Super Agent on Cadence Allegro AI Studio, the world?s first agentic AI platform for printed circuit board (PCB) and advanced packaging design, taking designers from system planning to final product in a single AI-native environment. The Cadence AuraStack AI Super Agent, accelerated by NVIDIA Blackwell and NVIDIA CUDA-X, coordinates domain-specific AI agents across planning, implementation and tightly integrated multiphysics analysis domains to compress the system-design cycle through manufacturing. With the AuraStack AI Super Agent, Cadence is now the only provider with agentic AI solutions spanning the full electronic system design flow, from digital and analog silicon design, advanced packaging, through to PCB design, building on its ChipStack, InnoStack and ViraStack AI Super Agents. The AuraStack AI Super Agent brings together automation and optimization for system planning, constraints management, physical structure definition, IP creation and reuse, place and route, design for manufacturability and multiphysics analysis across Cadence?s system design and analysis portfolio. It introduces a unified, AI-driven multiphysics foundation that concurrently models and optimizes electrical, thermal and mechanical behavior?including SI/PI, thermal, mechanical stress, drop, vibration and fatigue analysis?within a closed-loop environment, enabling earlier tradeoff evaluation and product-level optimization across the entire design flow. This continuous multiphysics feedback loop enables real-time design convergence, reducing late-stage surprises and improving overall system reliability. The AuraStack AI Super Agent?s key benefits include: Accelerating time to market by 2X, with 15X productivity and multiphysics-driven quality?automating complex tasks, expanding design exploration. Unifying separate engineering teams around a shared, multiphysics-aware design environment with a single source of truth across domains. Advancing early and continuous multiphysics co-optimization to reduce late-stage rework and costly design iterations. Unifies Cadence multiphysics signoff solutions, such as Celsius Thermal Solver, Clarity 3D Solver for 3D-EM, MSC Nastran and Marc Linear and Non-Linear Finite Element Analysis Solvers for mechanical analysis, and Sigrity X Platform for signal and power integrity. Limiting expensive respins by identifying system issues earlier in development. Enabling product-level optimization, including co-optimization with advanced packaging approaches. Cadence is collaborating with industry leaders to deploy AuraStack AI Super Agent workflows for real-world advanced IC packaging and PCB design challenges. NVIDIA is using Cadence to help automate and optimize increasingly complex system design workflows for its engineering teams. Cadence is partnering with TSMC to help customers accelerate advanced package implementation through AI-driven automation, enabling timely design convergence for increasingly complex multi-die systems. Socionext is leveraging Cadence to accelerate the automation and optimization of increasingly complex semiconductor package and PCB design workflows. FORVIA HELLA continues to advance intelligent, sustainable mobility solutions that will define the future of automotive technology. Schneider Electric is collaborating with Cadence to apply AI-driven design automation and engineering expertise to accelerate electronic design workflows and scale institutional knowledge across engineering teams. The Cadence AuraStack AI Super Agent will be available in 2026.