Synopsys expands generative AI to boost chip design workflows

Synopsys has announced the expansion of its generative AI capabilities for its semiconductor design solutions, aiming to accelerate development timelines and support more complex design projects.

The company's Synopsys.ai Copilot applications, offering assistive and creative AI tools, are now available for early access customers. According to Synopsys, these capabilities are designed to improve productivity for engineering teams and enable faster design cycles, addressing the increasing complexity of modern semiconductor projects and industry workforce shortages.

Assistive capabilities

Among the newly available features, the assistive GenAI capabilities include a knowledge assistant and workflow assistant application. These tools are being utilised by some of Synopsys' top customers to reduce time spent on documentation searches and script generation, enabling engineers to be both more productive and faster in their tasks. Early reports indicate that customers using the knowledge assistant are realising 30% faster ramp time for early-career engineers.

Documentation searches and the creation of scripts, processes which previously took hours, can now be completed in minutes through the Synopsys.ai Copilot platform. The new workflow assistant application is said to improve time to solutions for scripts by an average of 2X, and when used with Synopsys PrimeTime it can generate scripts 10X to 20X faster than traditional methods.

These productivity boosts mean that less experienced engineers can handle more complex tasks with greater independence while continuing to maintain high quality standards.

The knowledge assistant application is also now accessible for all Synopsys Cloud users, across both Software as a Service (SaaS) and Bring Your Own Cloud (BYOC) deployment models. The Synopsys Cloud SaaS platform, which hosts over 100 startups, integrates the knowledge assistant into workflows, supporting further acceleration of engineering productivity and reducing the time required to bring products to tape-out.

Creative capabilities

The company's creative GenAI features, which focus on formal assertion generation and register-transfer level (RTL) code generation, have also shown significant impacts with early access customers. These tools are reportedly reducing design and verification cycles from days to hours, and hours to minutes.

One customer, an AI infrastructure solutions provider, said it had achieved a 35% improvement in engineering productivity for both junior and senior engineers within formal verification workflows, citing automated testbench creation with high levels of syntactic and functional accuracy. This accelerated workflow enabled the validation of 10 design components in just 10 days.

Simulation and analysis expansion

Synopsys is now extending these AI capabilities into simulation and analysis, with Ansys - now part of Synopsys - recently launching the Ansys Engineering Copilot, a virtual assistant built to increase engineer productivity and speed.

The latest release of Ansys also included updates to its SimAI product, a physics-agnostic application that matches the predictive accuracy of Ansys simulation with AI-driven performance. SimAI is now integrated with Ansys optiSLang, which allows for faster dataset creation, AI training, and enables further exploration of design variations with shorter product development cycles.

Autonomous agent technology

Looking ahead, Synopsys' generative AI serves as the foundation for new AgentEngineer technology under development. This approach introduces agents and multi-agent systems trained to enhance engineering workflows by increasing levels of autonomous execution. These agents are intended to improve productivity, deliver better results, and reduce computational requirements.

Synopsys and Microsoft have joined forces to develop this agentic AI technology and recently demonstrated the first prototype, built on Microsoft Discovery, at DAC 2025.

"Together, we are not just optimising existing workflows - we are introducing a new paradigm to advance engineering innovation and productivity for next-generation chip designs," said Aseem Datar, Vice President, Product Innovation at Microsoft. "Our collaboration is redefining what is possible in the industry, leveraging Synopsys' deep domain expertise and the power and scale of Microsoft Discovery."

Synopsys envisions that its AgentEngineer technology will evolve from supporting step-level actions by single agents, through to enabling complex multi-agent interactions, dynamic flow optimisation with adaptive learning, and eventually to fully autonomous decision-making within engineering processes.

"AI is revolutionising every layer of chip design and fuelling a wave of ingenuity to deliver the next generation of advanced SoCs," said Sanjay Bali, Senior Vice President, Strategy and Product Management, Synopsys. "With the latest Synopsys.ai Copilot capabilities supporting assistive and creative applications across the chip design flow and delivering significant customer impact, we are empowering engineering teams to increase the quality of designs, free their time for additional high-value opportunities, and accelerate technology innovation."