Cadence Unleashes ChipStack AI Super Agent

Cadence reports the launch of the ChipStackAI Super Agent—an agentic AI solution for front-end silicon design and verification. The Cadence ChipStack AI Super Agent is an agentic workflow for automating chip design and verification. It provides productivity improvements for coding designs and testbenches, creating test plans, orchestrating regression testing, debugging and automatically fixing issues, according to Cadence.

“ChipStack represents a major leap in our design-for-AI and AI-for-design strategy, applying agentic AI directly to our customers’ front-end flows to tackle the growing complexity and scale of modern chips,” says Anirudh Devgan, president and CEO, Cadence. “By leveraging intelligent agents that autonomously call our underlying tools, we are enabling dramatic productivity gains for our customers in critical design and verification tasks while freeing scarce engineering talent to focus on innovation.”

The newly launched ChipStack AI Super Agent exemplifies Cadence’s approach to Intelligent System Design, where AI orchestration, principled simulation and accelerated computing work together to deliver solutions for semiconductor and system innovation. This agentic AI solution orchestrates virtual engineers, all using Cadence’s foundational electronics design automation tools.

The technology integrates agentic AI with Cadence optimization AI and AI assistant solutions, which have been used in over 1,000 tapeouts to date, including the Verisium Verification Platform and Cadence Cerebrus Intelligent Chip Explorer, as well as Cadence’s JedAI data and AI platform.

The ChipStack AI Super Agent supports cloud-based and on-premises frontier models, including open NVIDIA Nemotron models that can be customized with NVIDIA NeMo and cloud-hosted models such as OpenAI GPT, to improve designer productivity. 

“Our customers are facing a significant senior deficit in the engineering talent needed to deliver on their product roadmaps,” says Paul Cunningham, vice president and general manager of Research and Development, Cadence. “Our ChipStack AI Super Agent is a game changer for design and verification productivity, and deployments are ramping fast.”

The Cadence ChipStack AI Super Agent is in early deployment with several chip design and system companies, including Altera, NVIDIA, Qualcomm and Tenstorrent.

“As semiconductor complexity continues to accelerate, AI has become essential to designing the next generation of chips,” says Timothy Costa, general manager of Industrial and Computational Engineering, NVIDIA. “Our collaboration with Cadence, including innovations like the ChipStack AI Super Agent, demonstrates how combining intelligent reasoning capabilities such as Mental Models and automated formal test plan generation with NVIDIA accelerated computing can unlock new levels of productivity and efficiency for chip designers.”

The Cadence ChipStack AI Super Agent is available now in early access. For more information, visit Cadence’s AI for Design product page.

Sources: Press materials received from the company and additional information gleaned from the company’s website.