Cadence Design Systems has announced a fully autonomous virtual AI engineer for chip design at Computex 2026, marking what the company called the industry’s first Level-5 autonomous agentic AI system for semiconductor development.
The system, powered by NVIDIA technologies, extends Cadence’s ChipStack AI Super Agent platform and aims to automate complex chip verification workflows.
The company said the platform also uses NVIDIA’s Nemotron models and runs within the OpenShell runtime, a sandboxed environment designed to secure autonomous AI agents. Cadence said the system enables semiconductor companies to run dynamic simulations in automated workflows while protecting sensitive design data.
“We see our customers using AI to let their expert engineers take on more ambitious silicon designs with greater speed and confidence,” said Paul Cunningham, Senior Vice President and General Manager of the System Verification Group at Cadence. “With the ChipStack AI Super Agent, we’re taking the next step, moving from AI that assists engineers to autonomous virtual engineers that can implement real design and verification work.”
The company added that the platform can deliver more than 40 times faster RTL validation cycles and reduce a verification loop from five weeks to less than a day.
The Level-5 autonomy allows Cadence to independently execute chip design and verification tasks like specification understanding, RTL generation, verification planning, simulation, formal analysis, debugging and design convergence. Engineers can still supervise and guide the workflows when required.
The AI system integrates with collaboration environments and tools such as Codex and Claude Code. It also evaluates intermediate results, determines next actions and iterates towards task completion without relying on step-by-step prompts.
Cadence acquired ChipStack in November 2025 and launched its first product in February 2026. In April, the company expanded the platform into a broader portfolio of AI super agents, including ViraStack AI Super Agent for analog design and InnoStack AI Super Agent for digital implementation and signoff.
The Level-5 autonomous capabilities of the ChipStack AI Super Agent and the AgentStack orchestration framework will be available to early-access customers in the second half of 2026, the company added.
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