Cadence extends its AI agents beyond chips with AuraStack for circuit boards and packaging
Integrated circuit and electronic hardware design company Cadence Design Systems Inc. today announced a new artificial intelligence agent that assists with packaging and system design, the step after silicon has been customized and produced, marking how chips and components get used in electronic devices.
AuraStack, a super-agent within the company’s Allegro AI studio, provides agentic design assistance for engineers who are designing and customizing packaging and printed circuit boards that turn silicon into phones, servers and AI infrastructure.
“The automation in system design is pedestrian at best compared to what happens in chip design,” said Vivek Mishra, corporate vice president of the System Design and Analysis Group. “There are a lot of point tools. The teams are quite fragmented. The workflows are tedious.”
Modern electronic products are not simple collections of chips. The components must be combined together with numerous constraints in mind, taking into account power delivery, cooling, wiring and other mechanics on the circuit board that must account for heat, vibration, warping and manufacturing needs. Although chip design has evolved over multiple decades of automation, the packaging for chips (the black plastic square with “pins” coming out of it that people associate with chips on boards) and design of the systems they are placed on still require in-depth analysis, specialized tools and careful design decisions before they enter production.
