Cadence’s ChipStack AI Super Agent has officially obtained Level-5 autonomy, as the announcement at COMPUTEX 2026 effectively confirms it as a fully autonomous virtual AI design engineer for semiconductor development.
The system is designed to independently execute complex chip design and verification tasks, using Cadence’s electronic design automation tools alongside NVIDIA Nemotron AI models while running inside NVIDIA’s OpenShell secure runtime environment.
Thanks to the latest iteration, it is now capable of evaluating intermediate results, deciding on the next actions, and iterating toward completion across tasks, including specification analysis, RTL generation, verification planning, formal analysis, simulation, debugging, and design convergence. Engineers remain in a supervisory role, reviewing results and providing guidance when necessary.
With billions of compute hours every year running millions of verification tests on chip designs at NVIDIA, the ChipStack AI Super Agent is capable of handling hundreds of simulations automatically through Cadence Xcelium Logic Simulation and Jasper Formal Verification, leading to more than 40x faster RTL validation cycles – e.g., 5 weeks of work can be cut down to less than a day.
Cadence says one of the key differentiators is that the autonomous agents remain tightly connected to the company’s physics-based design and verification engines, ensuring AI-generated actions are backed by proven computational models instead of relying solely on large language model reasoning.
Security is also a major part of the announcement. The platform runs within NVIDIA OpenShell, a sandboxed runtime that provides governance controls, isolation mechanisms, and managed access to design tools and intellectual property.
The launch marks the latest step in Cadence’s rapid expansion of agentic AI products following its acquisition of ChipStack in November 2025. Since then, the company has introduced multiple AI-focused offerings, including ViraStack AI Super Agent for analog and custom design, InnoStack AI Super Agent for digital implementation and signoff, and AgentStack, which serves as the orchestration layer coordinating autonomous workflows across the chip development process.
Cadence expects the new Level-5 autonomous capabilities for ChipStack AI Super Agent and the AgentStack orchestration framework to enter early-access availability during 2H 2026.
