Rapidus and Cadence Team Up to Speed Up Advanced Chip Design With AI Agents

Rapidus and Cadence are combining forces on a new AI tool for chip design, aiming to cut design turnaround time by up to 2x compared to traditional workflows.

The two companies announced a collaboration that folds Cadence's InnoStack AI Super Agent into Rapidus' AI-Agentic Design Solution (Raads). The goal is to let AI agents manage entire design workflows for advanced-node system-on-chip (SoC) development, not just handle isolated tasks.

Why This Matters

Rapidus is a Japanese chipmaker building an AI-native foundry, where AI plays a role in nearly every stage of semiconductor manufacturing. Cadence makes electronic design automation (EDA) software that chip designers rely on to plan, simulate and verify SoCs before they go into production.

As chip designs grow more complex, especially for the AI hardware boom, design teams need tools that can coordinate work across the entire process instead of optimizing one step at a time. That is the pitch behind this partnership.

What's New

Rapidus is expanding its Raads lineup with two new tools: Raads Navigator and Raads Indicator. Both are built to improve quality assurance and help designers catch and resolve issues earlier in the process.

These new tools now integrate with Cadence's InnoStack AI Super Agent, which handles agentic orchestration across SoC design stages. That covers everything from early architectural exploration through implementation and signoff.

Rapidus is targeting up to a 2x improvement in design turnaround time (TAT) over traditional flows, though the company has not detailed specific benchmarks behind that figure.

What They're Saying

Cadence president and CEO Anirudh Devgan framed the move as a shift from task-level AI to workflow-level AI. "Advanced-node SoC design increasingly requires AI agents that can orchestrate complex workflows across the design lifecycle, not just optimize individual tasks," he said. "By combining Cadence's InnoStack AI Super Agent with Rapidus' Raads platform, we are extending agentic AI into a leading-edge semiconductor ecosystem, enabling customers to improve productivity, accelerate design closure and bring more advanced silicon to market faster."

Rapidus CEO Dr. Atsuyoshi Koike tied the news to the company's foundry ambitions. "At its completion, our Innovative Integration for Manufacturing facility will be the most advanced, AI-native foundry where AI is incorporated at almost every stage of semiconductor manufacturing," he said. "By evolving Raads and integrating it with Cadence's InnoStack AI Super Agent, we are strengthening our AI-agentic design environment to help customers manage increasing SoC complexity, improve engineering productivity and realize the full value of Rapidus' advanced process technologies."

What's Next

Rapidus and Cadence plan to discuss the collaboration further at CadenceLIVE Japan 2026, where Koike will deliver a keynote on how Rapidus is evolving Raads alongside Cadence's agentic AI and EDA tools.

This follows a pattern of Cadence deepening ties with major foundries on AI-driven design tooling, similar to its earlier multi-year deal with Intel Foundry. It signals that agentic AI is becoming a standard layer in how the industry approaches advanced-node chip development, not just a buzzword attached to individual features.