Cadence, NVIDIA expand partnership to build AI-driven chip design systems

Cadence Design Systems and NVIDIA are expanding their collaboration to develop AI-driven engineering tools for chip and system design. The companies aim to address growing complexity in semiconductor development and AI infrastructure by combining design software with accelerated computing.

The partnership focuses on integrating Cadence’s design software portfolio with NVIDIA’s computing stack to support agentic AI systems. These systems use autonomous agents to translate design inputs into workflows, generate chip designs, detect errors, and manage long engineering processes.

A key outcome of the collaboration is the Cadence Millennium M2000 supercomputer, designed to handle large-scale chip and system design tasks. The system uses NVIDIA Grace CPUs and Blackwell GPUs to improve processing throughput and reduce power consumption. Cadence said the platform can deliver up to 80 times higher throughput and up to 20 times lower power usage compared to traditional setups.

The expanded portfolio includes tools across electronic design automation, system design, and life sciences. These include chip implementation, thermal and power analysis, circuit simulation, and computational fluid dynamics. Some tools are optimized with NVIDIA CUDA-X libraries to improve performance for large-scale simulations.

The companies are also integrating design platforms with NVIDIA Omniverse for visualization and digital twin capabilities. These integrations support multi-disciplinary engineering workflows and simulation environments.

Anirudh Devgan, president and CEO of Cadence, said, “Through our expanded collaboration with NVIDIA, we’re bringing together Cadence’s expertise in agentic IC design and physics-driven optimization with NVIDIA’s accelerated computing to advance a new era of AI-driven chip innovation.”

Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA, said, “Together, NVIDIA and Cadence have created the Cadence Millennium M2000—a revolutionary AI supercomputer built to tackle the immense scale and complexity of designing the world’s next generation of infrastructure.”