Reimagining Chip Design – From Spec to Signoff with Cadence AI Super Agents

At CadenceLIVE Silicon Valley 2026, Cadence took a major step toward fully autonomous chip design-introducing two powerful new AI Super Agents that complete an end-to-end chip design flow. The ViraStack AI Super Agent targets analog design and verification, while the InnoStack AI Super Agent addresses digital implementation and signoff. Together with the previously launched ChipStack AI Super Agent for digital RTL design and verification, Cadence now offers autonomous AI coverage across the full chip design spectrum.

Cadence also announced AgentStack, a unified head agent that orchestrates all the Super Agents and is extensible from chip design to 3D-IC design to system design and analysis. AgentStack provides a common terminal user interface with knowledge and skill sharing among the Super Agents.

Figure 1: Cadence AgentStack and AI Super Agents

Entering the AI-First Era of EDA

General-purpose large language models (LLMs) can generate designs and testbenches, but they operate on probabilistic intuition rather than sound engineering principles. The Cadence AI Super Agents blend LLM-based generation with principled EDA tools in carefully crafted agentic workflows guided by extensive prompt engineering through Cadence native skills. They break complex objectives into domain- and tool-specific tasks, reasoning across problems and delegating sub-tasks to sub-agents. These sub-agents, in turn, assign atomic tasks to individual tool agents, which then invoke Cadence principled EDA tools directly.

Mental Models and Cadence Native Skills

At the core of Cadence Super Agents are Mental Models and Cadence Native Skills.

Mental Models are knowledge graphs that aggregate existing design data, specifications, diagrams, libraries, and any other human-readable content that represents design intent. Mental Models serve as golden sources of ground truth on which super agents can base their actions.

Cadence Native Skills are advanced prompt engineering files that teach LLMs how to interact with Cadence principled EDA tools-how to drive them at a low level, as well as how to interpret their most detailed low-level trace and log files.

ChipStack: Digital Design and Verification

The ChipStack AI Super Agent offers autonomous RTL design, verification, and debug. Working from design specifications, and optionally also from any prior existing RTL and testbenches, the ChipStack AI Super Agent automatically generates or refactors RTL and testbenches to implement the specification and verify that the implementation conforms to the specification.

ViraStack: Analog Design and Verification

Custom and analog design remains among the most time-intensive stages of IC development and relies heavily on the expertise of a select set of skilled designers. The ViraStack AI Super Agent brings agentic automation to this field with skills in schematic creation, testbench development, circuit optimization, and layout migration. ViraStack agents explore options and quantify tradeoffs, guiding convergence across performance, power, and reliability targets. Companies have rich libraries of analog IP from their decades of investment in Cadence's Virtuoso technology. The ViraStack AI Super Agent can autonomously mine this IP library and help migrate proven schematics to newer process nodes and specifications as needed for new projects.

Figure 2: ViraStack AI Super Agent

InnoStack: Digital Physical Implementation to Signoff

The InnoStack AI Super Agent focuses on digital implementation and signoff-from synthesis and place-and-route through signoff analysis and ECO execution-using specialized agents to speed iteration and convergence. Powered by Cadence digital implementation and signoff principled EDA tools, InnoStack agents explore broad design spaces by tuning constraints, floorplans, and timing, power, and area goals. By running parallel experiments at scale, they uncover fixes and optimizations that manual teams can't practically attempt-helping resolve collateral issues and drive closure.

Figure 3: InnoStack AI SuperAgent

Engineering, Accelerated

The Cadence ChipStack, ViraStack, and InnoStack AI Super Agents, along with the unified AgentStack head agent, enable a paradigm shift towards fully autonomous end-to-end chip design.

The ChipStack AI Super Agent is available now for customer deployments. The Cadence ViraStack and InnoStack AI SuperAgents are in early engagements with development partners.

Learn more about the ChipStack AI Super Agent and watch the demo: