DAC 2026 Wrap-Up: AI-Powered Engineering Moves from Vision to Workflow Reality

Every year, Design Automation Conference (DAC) brings big announcements, packed demos, and deep technical conversations—and this year at DAC 2026, the inflection point was AI moving from point-task assistance to workflow-level autonomy.

Across a week of high-energy booth demonstrations, engaging sessions, and conversations with customers, partners, researchers, and innovators, Cadence showed how AI-driven design, accelerated compute, hardware-assisted verification, and system-level analysis are coming together to help engineering teams move from growing complexity to greater speed, precision, and confidence, reinforcing the strength of Cadence’s Design for AI and AI for Design strategy.

One standout moment at DAC was the excitement around AI-powered engineering. Kartik Hegde, senior software engineering group director at Cadence, and Da Yang, senior director of product, semiconductor, and EDA at NVIDIA, drew a huge audience at the DAC pavilion for their discussion on large language models (LLMs) in production chip design. A key takeaway from the session was the importance of deeply grounding AI agents in EDA tools and workflows. While generative AI has already shown its value in helping engineers write code, agentic AI points to a more transformative future in which systems can take ownership of engineering tasks, evaluate results, determine next steps, and continuously drive workflows toward closure.

Cadence–NVIDIA Collaboration Showcases AI-Powered Engineering

At DAC, NVIDIA highlighted its expanding collaboration with Cadence through demonstrations spanning AI-driven chip design, multiphysics simulation, and engineering automation. Featured technologies included the ChipStack AI Super Agent, Celsius Studio Platform for AI-enabled multiphysics design, and the latest ViraStack AI Super Agent, which extends agentic AI across semiconductor design workflows. Cadence also showcased CUDA-X library adoption and GPU acceleration of Cadence solutions, enabling faster simulation and AI-assisted design. The ChipStack AI Super Agent is built on NVIDIA Nemotron models and secured by the NVIDIA OpenShell runtime.

At the Cadence booth, attendees also saw live demonstrations of the ChipStack, ViraStack, InnoStack, and AuraStack AI Super Agents, illustrating how specialized AI agents can streamline tasks across chip design, verification, custom and analog design, digital implementation and signoff, and PCB and advanced packaging design.

Millennium Solution Stacks Take the Spotlight at DAC

DAC also served as an excellent platform for Cadence to showcase the Millennium Solution Stack as a purpose-built design acceleration solution for modern EDA, multiphysics, and system analysis workloads. The message was clear: While deploying GPUs is straightforward, building a production-ready engineering environment requires an optimized combination of compute, memory, software, workflows, licensing, and support. The Millennium platform brings these elements together in a validated, enterprise-ready platform.

Domain-specific Millennium solution stacks further tailor this approach with optimized GPU and CPU infrastructure, high-performance interconnects, middleware, GPU-accelerated Cadence solvers, and agentic AI for targeted applications across semiconductor design, 3D-IC signoff, multiphysics simulation, digital twins, data center design, turbomachinery, combustion, hypersonics, and other high-performance engineering domains. 

To unlock the full potential of the Millennium platform, Cadence is optimizing EDA and SDA solutions to take full advantage of NVIDIA accelerated computing. The Millennium M2000 Supercomputer integrates NVIDIA Blackwell systems and CUDA-X libraries, while Cadence solutions also use NVIDIA Grace CPUs and tools, including Jasper Formal Verification, are being optimized for NVIDIA Vera CPUs.The image below provides a clear view of solution readiness alongside the performance impact demonstrated through NVIDIA GPU benchmarks.

The Millennium Solution Stack is positioned around three core advantages: optimized performance, faster deployment, and solution-level value. By integrating hardware, software, and AI into a single platform, the Millennium platform reduces deployment complexity, accelerates time to productivity, and enables engineers to tackle larger, more complex design and simulation workloads with greater efficiency.

Hardware-Assisted Verification and Software-Driven Validation Remain Essential

Another clear takeaway from DAC was that software-driven verification is a necessity for teams building today’s most complex SoCs. At the Cadence booth, the combination of Palladium emulation and Protium prototyping platforms demonstrated how seamless hardware-software co-design can accelerate pre-silicon bring-up and enable teams to validate complex workloads earlier in the development cycle.

These demonstrations were supported by deep technical engagement from the Cadence applications engineering team, including Hemanth Kumar Peddi and Mariana Ferreira Marques, who helped drive workload-centric conversations with attendees. Their expertise reinforced a central DAC theme: Advanced platforms are most effective when paired with practical engineering guidance, production insight, and a clear understanding of customer use cases.

Celebrating Technical Leadership and the Next Generation of Innovators

The conference offered an opportunity to celebrate the people advancing the design automation community. During the event, the IEEE CEDA President and DAC Chair recognized the newly elected IEEE Fellows in design automation. Cadence was proud to celebrate William Hung, corporate VP of research and development for HSV software development, as one of the newly elected IEEE Fellows, a meaningful recognition of technical excellence and sustained contributions to the field.

The DAC Young Fellows Program was another highlight, marking a historic year with 241 fellows from 20 countries. Cadence had the honor of presenting during the opening ceremony, where David Junkin, academic network program manager, spoke about the future of the industry. Cadence team members also served as judges for the video contest, in which nearly 200 fellows submitted videos about their favorite DAC presentation, and 18 were recognized for their compelling submissions. The program concluded with more than 240 fellows receiving certificates, reinforcing Cadence’s commitment to partnering with academia, advancing technology, and helping foster the future engineering workforce.

Continuing the Momentum Beyond DAC

DAC 2026 highlighted how the semiconductor industry is advancing toward faster, more intelligent engineering workflows. Throughout the event, Cadence showcased innovations spanning design, verification, simulation, and system analysis, powered by accelerated computing and physics-based technologies. From AI super agents and production-proven EDA and SDA solutions to the Millennium Solution Stacks, the portfolio demonstrated how Cadence is helping engineering teams tackle growing design complexity with greater speed, efficiency, and confidence.

Thank you to everyone who visited the Cadence booth, joined our sessions, explored our demos, and shared valuable conversations throughout the week. We look forward to building on this momentum with customers, partners, researchers, and the broader design automation community as we shape the next era of intelligent, accelerated engineering.

Ready to accelerate your most complex engineering workloads? Explore the Cadence Millennium Solution Stack and connect with an expert today.

Written by Veena Parthan, Lead Marketing Writer, Cadence