Cadence Design Systems, announced a major multi-year expansion of its strategic collaboration with Intel Foundry. The structured partnership aims at enabling and speeding up DTCO for Intel’s future semiconductor manufacturing technologies, beginning immediately with the revolutionary Intel 14A process technology.
AI-Based EDA & Semiconductor Co-Optimization
With advancements in silicon processes that have taken silicon geometries down to sub-nanometer ranges, conventional sequential approaches in chip design have started showing their limitations. Overcoming these limitations requires tight synchronization between electronic design automation (EDA) software algorithms and foundational foundry chemical-mechanical manufacturing steps.
This expanded DTCO partnership directly unifies Cadence’s portfolio of agentic AI-driven EDA tools and silicon-proven Design Intellectual Property (IP) portfolios with Intel Foundry‘s advanced process manufacturing and multi-die packaging engineering. The joint engineering teams will focus heavily on tuning software tools, reference flows, and physical routing methodologies to maximize transistor density, power efficiency, and processing throughput-collectively referred to as performance, power, and area (PPA) optimization.
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A core milestone of the renewed collaboration includes the co-development and optimization of production-ready Process Design Kits (PDKs) for the Intel 14A node. By embedding Cadence’s context-aware, autonomous agentic AI design workflows natively into the Intel validation pipeline, the joint framework enables global fabless semiconductor developers to reduce pre-tapeout design risks, automate tedious layout verification, and drastically compress chip production lifecycles.
“Advancing our relationship with Intel into a much deeper partnership is a major milestone for both companies,” said Anirudh Devgan, president and chief executive officer, Cadence. “This collaboration will leverage the strengths of both companies to empower customers to unlock new levels of performance, power, and efficiency, advance the state of the art and accelerate the realization of next-generation products.”
“Our expanded collaboration with Cadence reflects Intel Foundry’s continued focus on delivering on its technology roadmap and ecosystem on behalf of our customers,” said Naga Chandrasekaran, executive vice president and general manager of Intel Foundry. “By combining Intel’s process and packaging with Cadence’s AI-driven design tools, we are enabling deeper co-optimization, strengthening our ability to deliver on customers’ needs, and showcasing the ability of both companies to drive innovation at scale.”