Cadence introduces an AI agent to speed up computer chip design

By Stephen Nellis

WASHINGTON, Feb 10 (Reuters) - Cadence Design Systems on Tuesday rolled out a virtual artificial intelligence "agent" to help firms like Nvidia speed up the complex process of designing computer chips, a key front in the technology competition between the U.S. and China.

Cadence CDNS.O sells key tools for designing complex chips with tens of billions of transistors. Before those chips become physical silicon, engineers describe the circuit using a code-like language.

The new tool addresses a major industry bottleneck. Chip design is so labor-intensive and costly that engineering teams can spend up to 70% of their time writing and testing code, and analysts say AI-powered productivity boosts are critical for the U.S. to maintain its technological edge.

On Tuesday, Cadence introduced a tool called ChipStack AI Super Agent. The agent looks at a chip's design, builds a "mental model" of how the chip is supposed to work, and then can use various Cadence tools to test the design and fix bugs.

"Between now and the end of the decade, we are going to transform from being a company where you think of us as licensing new tools to a company to where we rent you virtual engineers," Paul Cunningham, vice president and general manager of research and development at Cadence, said.

Cadence said the agent speeds up some tasks by 10 times and is in early use by Nvidia NVDA.O, Altera and chip startup Tenstorrent, among others.

Dave Altavilla, principal analyst of HotTech Vision and Analysis, said such AI productivity tools could be instrumental in the tech competition between the U.S. and China. The U.S. government has restricted the export of advanced chip tools to China, but Chinese companies are developing their own chip design tools and are likely to turbocharge them with AI.

"You need that capability to compete," Altavilla said. "They're very smart, and they outnumber (U.S. chip designers) dramatically."

(Reporting by Stephen Nellis in Washington; Editing by Ethan Smith)

((stephen.nellis@thomsonreuters.com))