Cadence introduced its AuraStack “AI Super Agent” so that engineers can focus on productive design rather than repetitive tasks.
The company said AuraStack on Cadence Allegro AI Studio is the world’s first agentic AI platform for PCB and advanced packaging design. The agent can deliver two times faster time to market and 15 times higher productivity, said Ashutosh Mauskar, corporate vice president for product management and business development at Cadence, in an interview with me.
In particular, it helps chip designers deal with multiphysics, a problem that arises when different engineering systems like the physics of chip design, circuit board design, and system design all come together, Mauskar said. That enables the flow of a silicon-to-system design platform.
He said it can take designers from system planning to final product in a single AI-native environment. The Cadence AuraStack AI Super Agent, accelerated by Nvidia Blackwell and Nvidia CUDA-X, coordinates domain-specific AI agents across planning, implementation and tightly integrated multiphysics analysis domains to compress the system-design cycle through manufacturing.
Cadence has been charting its course for around eight years to create a vision for intelligent system design, built on an ability to develop complex computational software, which is fundamental to electronic design automation, EDA, he said.
“It has also extended the same core principles to system design and analysis. And if you have followed us in last three four years. We have built quite a portfolio of system design tools,” Mauskar said. “Many of them are homegrown, such as Allegro AI Studio and Signity and Clarity and so on and so forth. And many of them we have acquired in, especially in the physical or mechanical system design space, and that portfolio is is is the middle layer.”
Not replacing humans
Mauskar walked me through the design of a 5G component, and he noted that the optimization passes led to continual efficiencies, such as improving power consumption and saving on costs. It analyzes hot spots in the design and recommends circuit changes to bring down the power. In the end, the tool recommends a design that costs 65% less.
“It’s a very high productivity. One of the reasons why you will see the productivity gain is the engineers don’t have to do the routing by hand and can rely on an automatic router or placement engine,” Mauskar said.
As for replacing human designers, Mauskar said the legacy of humans is critical because they can recognize when tools aren’t adequate.
“We make existing senior engineers more productive, but more importantly, a lot of junior engineers are coming to the workforce every year. We make them become as productive or as close to productive as the senior engineers,” Mauskar said. “The idea there is not to replace, but to make junior engineers act like senior engineers very quickly, and make senior engineers more productive than they are today. One of the biggest bottlenecks today is you’re not focusing on engineering, therefore you don’t have time to do what ifs for many many things that you would like to do what if analysis for, and this type of productivity will allow you to do that.”
With the AuraStack AI Super Agent, Cadence is now the only provider with agentic AI solutions spanning the full electronic system design flow, from digital and analog silicon design, advanced packaging, through to PCB design, building on its ChipStack, InnoStack and ViraStack AI Super Agents.
“The next era of AI infrastructure—spanning data centers, automotive, aerospace and physical AI—will be defined not only by silicon, but by the systems that connect, power and cool it,” said Michael Jackson, corporate vice president of R&D for System Design and Analysis at Cadence, in a statement. “As hyperscale data centers deploy massive AI clusters and other industries advance increasingly intelligent, high-performance systems, engineering teams face growing complexity in PCB and advanced package design. Agentic AI orchestration, combined with trusted EDA and SDA tools, enables customers to move from manual iteration to intelligent, automated design realization.”
Agentic AI for Packaging and PCB Design Building on the same architecture as Cadence’s ChipStack AI Super Agent, agentic AI is combined with principled simulation and optimization tools, leveraging a mental model of the design intent, to automate and orchestrate the design exploration, realization and signoff.
The AuraStack AI Super Agent brings together automation and optimization for system planning, constraints management, physical structure definition, IP creation and reuse, place and route, design for manufacturability and multiphysics analysis across Cadence’s system design and analysis portfolio.
It introduces a unified, AI-driven multiphysics foundation that concurrently models and optimizes electrical, thermal and mechanical behavior—including SI/PI, thermal, mechanical stress, drop, vibration and fatigue analysis—within a closed-loop environment, enabling earlier tradeoff evaluation and product-level optimization across the entire design flow. This continuous multiphysics feedback loop enables real-time design convergence, reducing late-stage surprises and improving overall system reliability.
The AuraStack AI Super Agent’s key benefits include:
• Accelerating time to market by two times, with 15 times productivity and multiphysics-driven quality—automating complex tasks, expanding design exploration.
• Unifying separate engineering teams around a shared, multiphysics-aware design environment with a single source of truth across domains.
• Advancing early and continuous multiphysics co-optimization to reduce latestage rework and costly design iterations. Unifies Cadence multiphysics signoff solutions, such as Celsius Thermal Solver, Clarity 3D Solver for 3D-EM, MSC Nastran and Marc Linear and Non-Linear Finite Element Analysis Solvers for mechanical analysis, and Sigrity X Platform for signal and power integrity.
• Limiting expensive respins by identifying system issues earlier in development.
• Enabling product-level optimization, including co-optimization with advanced packaging approaches.
Industry leaders advancing agentic AI with Cadence
Cadence is collaborating with industry leaders to deploy AuraStack AI Super Agent workflows for real-world advanced IC packaging and PCB design challenges.
Nvidia is using Cadence to help automate and optimize increasingly complex system design workflows for its engineering teams.
“The scale and complexity of modern AI infrastructure demands a new design approach,” said Tim Costa, vice president and general manager of computational engineering at Nvidia, in a statement. “Nvidia’s collaboration with Cadence is advancing AI-powered engineering workflows that accelerate design convergence and innovation across the industry. The Cadence AuraStack AI Super Agent and the Millennium M2000 Supercomputer deliver up to 20X faster multiphysics performance, giving our engineers the capability to tackle the most demanding design challenges and bring the next generation of AI infrastructure to life.”
Cadence is partnering with TSMC to help customers accelerate advanced package implementation through AI-driven automation, enabling timely design convergence for increasingly complex multi-die systems.
“As advanced packaging complexity grows, customers need new levels of automation to achieve timely design convergence,” said Aveek Sarkar, director of the Ecosystem and Alliance Management Division at TSMC, in a statement “Our long-standing partnership with Open Innovation Platform (OIP) ecosystem partners like Cadence to deliver advanced package design and verification solutions for TSMC 3DFabric technologies helps customers accelerate the realization of next-generation multi-die systems for AI and highperformance computing applications. Through our multi-year collaboration on substrate auto routing, we are already enabling customers to boost productivity by 100X while delivering quality of results similar to manual routing.”
Socionext is leveraging Cadence to accelerate the automation and optimization of increasingly complex semiconductor package and PCB design workflows.
“AI-driven agents are set to transform IC package and PCB design by automating SI, PI and thermal workflows and enabling generative design,” said Iwasaki Toshifumi, lead design execution leading unit, Global Leading Group at Socionext, in a statement. “This acceleration allows our engineers to focus on higher-value work like architecture exploration, margin optimization, and multiphysics tradeoffs, while capabilities such as automated routing and chip-package-board co-design accelerate convergence and reduce manual effort.”
Forvia Hella continues to advance intelligent, sustainable mobility solutions that will define the future of automotive technology.
“Working closely with Cadence has fundamentally changed the way Forvia Hella develops advanced automotive electronics. Using AI-assisted placement technology, a task involving the placement of 300 components that previously took up to four days can now be completed in just four minutes,” said Sven Hoenecke, CEO of electronics NSA at Forvia Hella, in a statement. “This step change in productivity allows our engineers to evaluate more design alternatives, optimize layouts earlier in the development process, and accelerate the development of innovative products without compromising quality. By automating repetitive work, our teams can focus more time on solving complex engineering challenges and bringing new technologies to market faster.”
Schneider Electric is collaborating with Cadence to apply AI-driven design automation and engineering expertise to accelerate electronic design workflows and scale institutional knowledge across engineering teams.
“At Schneider Electric, we see AI as much more than a productivity tool. Our collaboration with Cadence has demonstrated the potential of AI to accelerate design activities and improve engineer efficiency,” said Daniel Gheno, senior vice president, Innovation and Technology EM at Schneider Electric, in a statement. “The next frontier is to combine design automation with engineering expertise, enabling companies to capture decades of know-how and make robust design decisions available to every engineer. We believe this is where AI can truly transform electronic design.”
Availability
The Cadence AuraStack AI Super Agent will be available in 2026. For more information, visit http://www.cadence.com/go/aurastack.