// TOM'S HARDWARE US — HARDWARE & GADGET
The state of agentic AI in chip design tools in 2026
With different ideas of “autonomous,” the new AI agents all answer to older tools.
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Three companies, Cadence, Synopsys, and Siemens EDA, dominate chip design software. Their software takes you from chip specification to a manufacturable layout. As AI has rapidly advanced, so have their Electronic Design Automation (EDA) agents, all sporting notable improvements in 2026. The addition of a reasoning model helps drive that flow for Cadence’s ChipStack super agent, Synopsys’ AgentEngineer, and Siemens’ Fuse EDA AI agent, each with its own claims to fame. Cadence at Computex on June 1 said its agent reached what it calls Level 5 autonomy. Rob Knoth, Senior Group Director of Strategy and New Ventures at Cadence, told Tom’s Hardware Premium that the demo was “what we call bounded Level 5 in one domain,” with the bulk of super-agent tech at “I’d say advanced Level 4.”
Synopsys said its spec-to-RTL (Register Transfer Level) workflow shown on March 11 reached “L4,” and the company told Tom’s Hardware Premium it now claims L5 capabilities for its long-horizon agents. Siemens’ agent launched March 16 with “self-verifying” loops announced on July 26. Meanwhile, outside these big three, Empyrean’s chairman, Liu Weiping, stated on Sept. 9 that its agent cut a layout task from four weeks to one, according to the South China Morning Post.
While the claims about what these agents do are specific and now known, what they have measured is not. All of the claimed improvements to speed are the vendors’ or their customers’ own figures, with many “up to” or “early evaluation” caveats. These figures often measure different things against different baselines, and the only evaluator Synopsys named in July, AMD, has not provided analysis beyond an endorsement.
In an evolving field, it can be difficult to hit a moving target, especially when the reported numbers measure different things. Some clarity is possible by following the distinct stages from human-only to human-reviewed agent autonomy. The agents fundamentally rely on existing technologies with known desired outputs for accurate evaluation.
Progress has so far followed three distinct generations. At Synopsys, by DSO.ai and reinforcement learning in 2020, generative AI capabilities with Synopsys.ai in 2023, and finally an open agentic AI stack from 2025–2026. All decisions must be validated by proven EDA engines, with the agent focused on evaluating intermediate results and determining subsequent actions. A model’s proposal is examined by an existing deterministic engine such as Xcelium, Jasper, Questa, Calibre, or Fusion Compiler within an iteration loop until final verification.
Measuring progress here does not follow a standard, but there are autonomy ladders with a general rating from Level 1 or L1 to Level 5 or L5 or, in Siemens’ case, no numbered level. Cadence, which uses levels, moves from optimization AI to conversational LLM, complex reasoning, agentic workflows, and then finally full autonomy, defined as taking a design from spec to verification “with minimal human intervention.”
Synopsys’ L framework goes from actions of single agents on a single design step to more complex ones with multiple agents, with further development focusing on adaptive learning and, ultimately, the agent’s ability to make decisions autonomously. The critical part for Synopsys is that “human engineers will and must always be in the loop.” Given the claims of progress, it’s clear that ladders, where they exist, are a form of marketing scaffolding that describes the same underlying architecture or loop.
The greatest claimed gains thus far are in the front-end design and verification stages, taking a specification from RTL to a verified design. This part of the process is a natural fit for LLMs, as the RTL, testbenches, and assertions are code. Where the loop used to wait on human analysis and input, the