Cadence launches AI agent to accelerate chip design as labor crunch intensifies

Cadence Touts AI as Way to Speed Design, Cope With Labor Crunch

Cadence built its own AI technology for the Super Agent, creating a mental model based on its knowledge of chip design that it says will not hallucinate or make up false information. Cadence Design Systems Inc. is introducing a new AI tool that can help speed the design of semiconductors, arguing that such technology is necessary to keep up with demand for chips and cope with shortages of skilled labor. A service called the ChipStack AI Super Agent will act as an assistant to engineers who are developing chips, the company said in a statement Tuesday. It will help them design, debug, verify and sign off on final blueprints. Cadence, a top maker of chip-design software, is pushing deeper into AI at a delicate moment. Investors have grown concerned that artificial intelligence will make traditional software obsolete, sending the industry's stocks into a tailspin. Cadence itself saw its shares slide during the past two weeks. But Cadence sees AI as a way to elevate design software, rather than destroy it. AI can help humans manage the staggering complexity of modern chips and escape routine tasks, the company said, bringing as much as a 10-fold increase in productivity. That means employees can focus more on innovating. "We're easily going to get over a trillion transistors in the chip, in the package, by the end of the decade," Cadence Senior Vice President Paul Cunningham said. "It's a phenomenal increase in complexity." Cadence built its own AI technology for the Super Agent because standard large language models weren't up to the challenge. It created a so-called mental model -- based on Cadence's arcane and highly technical knowledge of chip design -- that it says will not hallucinate, or make up false information. Chip development work is already a highly automated process. The job of laying out and verifying new designs has been done by software run on powerful computers for decades. But the sophistication of today's chips is putting a strain on that process. The latest processors now consist of multiple chips combined into one piece of silicon, adding to the complexity -- and increasing the chance that something goes wrong. As a result, even companies with the resources of Nvidia Corp. can't manage more than one design overhaul a year. Tweaks to existing layouts take months to deliver. And errors can cost billions of dollars in lost revenue. The process requires engineers to orchestrate a multitude of operations using various pieces of software. Much of it is routine work that's time-consuming but nonetheless requires an experienced hand. Cadence has made that a friendlier experience, Cunningham said. "You can chat with all of the Cadence products, and they'll talk back to you," he said. "You don't need to be the ultimate scripting expert. You don't need to know all of the fancy features and tool clicks of our graphic user interfaces. You can just say, 'Hey, look. This is what I want to do.'" The AI agent is a step toward creating a virtual engineering assistant -- something that will be needed as the industry deals with a tightening labor supply, Cunningham said. There will be a shortfall of tens of thousands of engineers by the end of the decade, he said, citing statistics from the Semiconductor Industry Association. For now, the AI tool should just help engineers be more efficient. There's nothing coming yet that can design a chip from start to finish, Cunningham said. "Do I believe that it could happen? Yes," he said. "But that's next level -- it's too hard."

Cadence introduces an AI agent to speed up computer chip design

WASHINGTON, Feb 10 (Reuters) - Cadence Design Systems on Tuesday rolled out a virtual artificial intelligence "agent" to help firms like Nvidia speed up the complex process of designing computer chips, a key front in the technology competition between the U.S. and China. Cadence (CDNS.O), opens new tab sells key tools for designing complex chips with tens of billions of transistors. Before those chips become physical silicon, engineers describe the circuit using a code-like language. The new tool addresses a major industry bottleneck. Chip design is so labor-intensive and costly that engineering teams can spend up to 70% of their time writing and testing code, and analysts say AI-powered productivity boosts are critical for the U.S. to maintain its technological edge. On Tuesday, Cadence introduced a tool called ChipStack AI Super Agent. The agent looks at a chip's design, builds a "mental model" of how the chip is supposed to work, and then can use various Cadence tools to test the design and fix bugs. "Between now and the end of the decade, we are going to transform from being a company where you think of us as licensing new tools to a company to where we rent you virtual engineers," Paul Cunningham, vice president and general manager of research and development at Cadence, said. Cadence said the agent speeds up some tasks by 10 times and is in early use by Nvidia (NVDA.O), opens new tab, Altera and chip startup Tenstorrent, among others. Dave Altavilla, principal analyst of HotTech Vision and Analysis, said such AI productivity tools could be instrumental in the tech competition between the U.S. and China. The U.S. government has restricted the export of advanced chip tools to China, but Chinese companies are developing their own chip design tools and are likely to turbocharge them with AI. "You need that capability to compete," Altavilla said. "They're very smart, and they outnumber (U.S. chip designers) dramatically." Reporting by Stephen Nellis in Washington; Editing by Ethan Smith Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles., opens new tab

Cadence announces ChipStack 'Super Agent' system for chip design and verification - SiliconANGLE

Cadence announces ChipStack 'Super Agent' system for chip design and verification Integrated circuit and electronic hardware design company Cadence Design Systems Inc. today announced the release of an artificial intelligence "Super Agent" designed to transform front-end silicon design and verification. The company said Cadence ChipStack AI Super Agent will help revolutionize how engineers automate chip design by improving productivity and speeding up coding, design and testbench creation by a factor of 10, as well as creating test plans, orchestrating regression tests, debugging and automatically fixing issues. In an interview with SiliconANGLE, Matt Graham, senior group director, verification software product management, and Kartik Hegde, senior group director of agentic AI, explained that the new agent focuses on the increasingly problematic pain point of verification in chip design. The Super Agent's name, ChipStack, is a product name carryover from when Cadence acquired the company in November 2025. "The ChipStack AI Super Agent is an umbrella, or symphony of agents, like an IP design agent, a verification agent, a system-on-chip integration agent, a debugging agent and more, working together," explained Graham. Verification is the bottleneck for engineers. ChipStack is intended to act as a junior engineer in the face of increasing complexity. "Verification is fundamentally NP complete and grows exponentially," Graham said. "Double the gate count, square the state space. That's the fundamental equation." Inside the agentic core, the mind-in-the-machine, Cadence developed the system to develop a "metal model" that could hold the entire project for engineering teams so that it could interpret all artifacts at once and act like a junior engineer. This allows chip design engineers to input the documentation, block diagrams, waveforms and timing relationships into the agentic loop, have it verified and then ask questions before sending it to automation down the line. Graham framed this problem within the chipmaking industry as having millions of dollars on the line. A single flaw could cost significant amounts if it went into production. Therefore, it needs to be caught early, so testing takes a significant number of resources. The agentic AI system integrates directly with Cadence's optimization AI and AI assistant solutions, which have already been used in more than 1,000 tapeouts to date, including within the company's Cerebrus Intelligent Chip Explorer, as well as JedAI data and AI platform. In an example workflow, a verification engineer takes the agentic system and points it at specifications, the various documents of chip design, drawings, pinouts and so forth and it generates the mental model. Then it generates a test plan, writes and updates test benches, runs simulations, reads logs/waveforms, identifies root causes and proposes fixes. At each stage, the engineer remains in the loop, working alongside it like a senior engineer proposing direction with a junior engineer, the agent, executing actions. "Verification is a deeply natural language reasoning problem and large language models are natural language processing engines," Hegde said. "It's just a perfect fit for the hair-on-fire problem the industry has." Ideally, Cadence wants to build toward a fully autonomous solution that will be able to send out agents and take a prompt, design a chip and do the testing, then provide a fully working chip. "The moonshot is fully autonomous integrated chip design," Graham said, "but we're taking the first steps." As for enterprise readiness, Cadence said the product is available to deploy in the cloud, hybrid and on-premises. Many chip design and fabrication companies are extremely covetous about their intellectual property and do not want it leaked to third parties. Cadence's ChipStack AI Super Agent is currently in early deployment with several chip design and system companies, including Altera Corp., Nvidia Corp. and Tenstorrent Inc.

Cadence launches AI agent to speed up computer chip design

Cadence Design Systems has introduced a virtual artificial intelligence agent. This tool aims to speed up the complex process of designing computer chips. Companies like Nvidia are already using it. Cadence Design Systems on Tuesday rolled out a virtual artificial intelligence "agent" to help firms like Nvidia speed up the complex process of designing computer ⁠chips, a key front in the technology competition between the U.S. and China. Cadence sells key tools for designing complex chips with tens of billions of transistors. Before those chips become physical silicon, engineers describe the circuit using a code-like language. The new tool addresses a major industry bottleneck. Chip design is so labor-intensive and costly that engineering teams can spend up to 70% of their time writing and testing code, and analysts say AI-powered productivity boosts are critical for the U.S. to maintain its technological edge. On Tuesday, Cadence introduced a tool called ChipStack AI Super Agent. The agent looks at a chip's design, builds a "mental model" of how the chip is supposed to work, and then can use various Cadence tools to test the design and fix bugs. "Between now and the end of the decade, we are going to transform from being a company where you think of us as licensing new tools to a company to where we rent you virtual engineers," Paul Cunningham, vice president and general manager of research and development at Cadence, said. Cadence said the agent speeds up some tasks by 10 times and is in early use by Nvidia, Altera and chip ⁠startup Tenstorrent, among others. Dave ⁠Altavilla, principal analyst of HotTech Vision and Analysis, said such AI productivity tools could be instrumental in the tech competition between the U.S. and China. The U.S. government has restricted the export of advanced chip tools to China, but Chinese companies are developing their own chip design tools and are likely to turbocharge them with AI. "You need that capability to compete," Altavilla said. "They're very smart, and they outnumber (U.S. chip designers) dramatically."

Cadence introduces an AI agent to speed up computer chip design

WASHINGTON, Feb 10 (Reuters) - Cadence Design Systems on Tuesday rolled out a virtual artificial intelligence "agent" to help firms like Nvidia speed up the complex process of designing computer chips, a key front in the technology competition between the U.S. and China. Cadence sells key tools for designing complex chips with tens of billions of transistors. Before those chips become physical silicon, engineers describe the circuit using a code-like language. The new tool addresses a major industry bottleneck. Chip design is so labor-intensive and costly that engineering teams can spend up to 70% of their time writing and testing code, and analysts say AI-powered productivity boosts are critical for the U.S. to maintain its technological edge. On Tuesday, Cadence introduced a tool called ChipStack AI Super Agent. The agent looks at a chip's design, builds a "mental model" of how the chip is supposed to work, and then can use various Cadence tools to test the design and fix bugs. "Between now and the end of the decade, we are going to transform from being a company where you think of us as licensing new tools to a company to where we rent you virtual engineers," Paul Cunningham, vice president and general manager of research and development at Cadence, said. Cadence said the agent speeds up some tasks by 10 times and is in early use by Nvidia, Altera and chip startup Tenstorrent, among others. Dave Altavilla, principal analyst of HotTech Vision and Analysis, said such AI productivity tools could be instrumental in the tech competition between the U.S. and China. The U.S. government has restricted the export of advanced chip tools to China, but Chinese companies are developing their own chip design tools and are likely to turbocharge them with AI. "You need that capability to compete," Altavilla said. "They're very smart, and they outnumber (U.S. chip designers) dramatically." (Reporting by Stephen Nellis in Washington; Editing by Ethan Smith)