Synopsys pushed chip design past task assistants into fully autonomous, long-running agents this week, unveiling design-verification and thermal-simulation orchestrators built on NVIDIA Nemotron at the 2026 DAC Chips to Systems Conference. The announcement, joined by parallel launches from Cadence and Siemens, marks the moment agentic AI moved from copilot to standalone workflow across all three EDA leaders.
50x Faster Time-to-Validated RTL
The company's flagship reveal is a fully autonomous, long-running design-verification agent that deconstructs DV goals from specification, design, test repository and user inputs, then orchestrates specialized agents in a closed loop from test-plan generation through coverage closure and advanced debug. Synopsys said the workflow, built on its AgentEngineer platform and NVIDIA's Nemotron 3 Ultra open model with the OpenShell runtime, delivers up to 50x faster time-to-validated RTL with a 20% improvement in coverage.
Autonomous Thermal Simulation Joins The Stack
Alongside DV, Synopsys demonstrated its first fully autonomous computer-aided engineering workflow, an electronics thermal analysis agent built on NVIDIA's Agent Toolkit and CUDA-X libraries that autonomously handles set-up, pre-processing and post-processing for Ansys Icepak simulations. The company also debuted an autonomous analog and mixed-signal flow driven by natural-language design intent, projecting a 3x productivity lift.
GPU Acceleration Widens Across The Portfolio
Synopsys said more than 20 EDA and multiphysics products are now GPU-enabled, including an 18x speedup for PrimeSim SPICE on NVIDIA GPUs, a 200x speedup for QuantumATK force-field simulations on Blackwell, and a 10x gain for Ansys Lumerical FDTD inside Multiphysics Fusion. NVIDIA VP Tim Costa said the collaboration lets teams compress development cycles from weeks to hours.
Agentic EDA Becomes A Three-Horse Race
The Synopsys unveil arrived alongside Cadence's AuraStack AI Super Agent and Siemens' Fuse EDA self-verifying agents, all built on NVIDIA's agentic AI stack. Customers are currently evaluating Synopsys' agentic EDA and CAE capabilities with general availability planned for the second half of 2026, positioning the industry for its first live production runs of long-running chip-design autonomy in Q4.
Reporting based on coverage from Synopsys, NVIDIA, EE Times Asia and Futurum.