Cadence launches AuraStack AI to speed PCB and chip design

Cadence Design Systems on Tuesday unveiled AuraStack, an artificial-intelligence agent that can turn plain-language design goals into printed circuit board and chip-package workflows that plan, lay out and virtually test hardware. The San Jose, California company called it the world’s first agentic AI platform for PCB and advanced packaging design, accelerated by NVIDIA Blackwell and NVIDIA CUDA-X.

AuraStack runs on Allegro AI Studio and coordinates agents across planning, implementation, constraints management, design reuse, manufacturability and multiphysics analysis. The company projects up to 2 times faster time to market and 15 times higher productivity.

In the demonstration Cadence showed, an engineer reworked a 5G smartphone circuit board into a cheaper version for a new market. AuraStack covers planning, manufacturability and physical-constraint checks that usually require repeated human intervention.

AuraStack is built on the same architecture as ChipStack AI Super Agent, which Cadence launched on February 10, 2026 for chip design and verification. ChipStack can improve productivity by up to 10 times, reached Level-5 autonomy on June 1, 2026, and can cut a typical five-week verification loop to less than a day. Cadence has already used its AI tools in more than 1,000 tapeouts, and ChipStack is in early deployment with Altera, NVIDIA, Qualcomm and Tenstorrent.

Cadence expanded its partnership with NVIDIA on March 17, 2026 and again on April 15, 2026 around accelerated solutions for agentic AI, physics-based simulation and digital twins. Cadence reported fiscal 2025 revenue of $5.297 billion, up from $4.641 billion in 2024, with year-end backlog of $7.8 billion and $3.8 billion expected to be recognized over the next 12 months. AuraStack is scheduled for rollout completion in September.