AI's role in chip design has shifted from a copilot to an orchestrator. In an interview at SEMICON West, Synopsys CEO Sassine Ghazi said the company now uses more than 40 task agents, each an expert in a specific tool. Recent advances in model reasoning enable long-horizon orchestration, where a designer specifies an outcome rather than a prompt, and the agents work together to achieve it.
Ghazi said some customers already provide a spec to Synopsys' autonomous agent, which translates it into verified RTL — the starting point for chip design. That step previously took many months and many human engineers. However, he acknowledged that expanding autonomy into physical implementation, physical verification, and final sign-off is not here today, though he has "no doubt" it will arrive.
Despite the ambition of some chipmakers to remove humans from the loop entirely, Ghazi argued that human judgment is still needed to define architecture, guide the process, and sign off before manufacturing. He also framed autonomy as a response to a shortage of chip engineers and pressure from systems companies to keep pace with rapidly changing AI workloads. The source notes that advanced packaging, physical AI, and digital twins are pushing the industry toward broader co-analysis and co-design across physics, materials, process, architecture, software, and the model itself.