DAC 2026: The next step in the partnership of Cadence and Intel Foundry collaboration was announced.
Cadence’s AI-driven digital and custom reference flows and tools are now certified on Intel 18A-P and 14A technolgies, based on the latest Intel Foundry process design kits (PDKs).
The two companies have co-optimised tools, flows, and methodologies for Intel 18A, Intel 18A-P, and Intel 14A, including RibbonFET Gate-all-around transistors and power delivery technologies such as PowerVia and PowerDirect.
The certified digital and custom reference flows cover AI-driven implementation, verification, and signoff, including synthesis, place-and-route, timing and power signoff, physical verification, reliability verification, and analogue/custom design.
The two companies have co-developed an advanced packaging reference design flow that supports Intel Foundry’s Embedded Multi-die Interconnect Bridge (EMIB) and EMIB-T technologies. It eliminates data conversion steps to streamline the workflow of multi-chiplet architectures, says Cadence. It enables concurrent design activities, and provides early thermal, signal integrity, and power integrity analysis across dies and packages.
The partners have also validated IP test chips in silicon on Intel 18A using Cadence interface and memory IP, demonstrating robust interoperability between Cadence IP, AI-driven flows, and Intel Foundry’s power delivery optimised process technologies.
Intel 14A is expected to deliver the same power but with higher performance than Intel 18A. Potential applications are AI accelerators, cloud and edge HPC and premium mobile applications. Cadence also speculates that in time, it will be used for aerospace and government designs.
Earlier this month, Cadence announced AuraStack AI Super Agent, running on Allegro AI Studio. Claimed to be the world’s first agentic AI platform for PCB and advanced packaging design.
It is fast, accelerated by Nvidia’s Blackwell and Cuda-X and co-ordinates domain-specific AI agents to automate and optimise system planning, constraints management, physical structure definition, IP creation and reuse, place and route and multi-physics analysis. It uses the same architecture as the ChipStack AI Super Agent and is claimed to accelerate time to market by a factor of two with 15x productivity.
More DAC news: https://www.electronicsweekly.com/market-sectors/ai/nvidia-says-agentic-ai-is-reshaping-chip-system-design-2026-07/