Cadence Design Systems has launched an AI-powered tool to support front-end semiconductor design and verification.

Dubbed ChipStack AI Super Agent, the company claims the tool is the “world’s first agentic workflow” that is capable of automating chip design from “specifications and high-level descriptions.”

The tool works by instructing multiple virtual engineers to use Cadence’s EDA (electronic design automation) tools, including its Verisium Verification Platform, Cerebrus Intelligent Chip Explorer, and JedAI data and AI platform.

The company said ChipStack offers up to 10x productivity improvements for coding designs and testbenches, test plan creation, regression testing, debugging, and automatic issue fixing. It also supports cloud-based and on-premises frontier models, including those hosted by Nvidia and OpenAI, to improve designer productivity.

Cadence said Altera, Nvidia, Qualcomm, and Tenstorrent are among the first adopters of the tool.

“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,” said 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.”

Paul Cunningham, VP and GM of research and development, Cadence, added: “Our customers are facing a significant senior deficit in the engineering talent needed to deliver on their product roadmaps. Our ChipStack AI Super Agent is a game changer for design and verification productivity, and deployments are ramping fast.”