EDA leaders bring autonomous chip design to DAC

At the 2026 DAC Chips to Systems Conference, Synopsys, Cadence and Siemens advanced agentic chip design from task assistance toward long-running autonomous workflows. Synopsys announced a fully autonomous design verification agent, its first fully autonomous CAE workflow for electronics thermal analysis, and autonomous EDA workflows on Microsoft Discovery developed with Microsoft and evaluated by AMD.

Synopsys said its verification agent can deliver up to 50x faster time-to-validated RTL with 20% additional coverage improvement, while early Microsoft Discovery results showed 25-40% reductions in debug cycle time. Cadence introduced AuraStack AI Super Agent for PCB and advanced packaging, completing a silicon-to-system agent portfolio and citing up to 20x faster multiphysics performance.

Siemens expanded its NVIDIA partnership with self-verifying agents in the Fuse EDA AI Agent system, claiming more than 10x faster library characterization and a 5x to 10x reduction in token costs. NVIDIA provided the shared foundation through Nemotron, OpenShell, CUDA-X and PhysicsNeMo, while also deploying its Vera CPU across internal EDA workflows with reported 1.5x gains on Synopsys VCS and Cadence Jasper.