Cadence Launches AuraStack AI to Accelerate Circuit Board and Chip Package Design

Cadence Design Systems (CDNS) on Wednesday announced the launch of AuraStack, an artificial intelligence-powered agent aimed at automating and accelerating the design of printed circuit boards and chip packages. The company claims the new tool, which extends its push into AI-driven engineering, can significantly reduce development time and boost productivity.

How AuraStack Works

According to the announcement reported by Reuters, AuraStack allows engineers to describe their design objectives in plain language. The AI agent then plans and executes the work using Cadence's existing software tools to lay out and virtually test the circuit designs. Cadence noted that the AI workloads will be accelerated by Nvidia chips.

The new tool is scheduled to be available this year, with the rollout expected to be completed in September, according to Michael Jackson, Cadence’s corporate vice president and general manager for system design and analysis.

Impact on Design Workflow

Cadence projects that AuraStack can reduce a product's time-to-market by up to 50% and increase productivity on individual tasks by as much as 15-fold. In a demonstration, the tool was used to re-engineer a 5G smartphone's circuit board for a new, lower-cost market. It recommended consolidating components for a 28% cost saving and identified a compatible, lower-cost power-management chip.

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"The bottleneck isn’t automation. It’s really engineering intelligence," Jackson told Reuters, referring to the system's ability to reason through complex trade-offs between cost and performance.

Ecosystem and Pricing

Cadence named Nvidia, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC), and Schneider Electric as early users of the technology. The company stated that customers can pair AuraStack with their preferred AI model, including those from OpenAI, Google, or Anthropic, as well as open-source alternatives.

Pricing for AuraStack will follow a consumption-based model determined by the intensity of the AI model's workload. This will be in addition to the licensing fees for Cadence's underlying design software, Jackson said.