Re-engineering Engineering from Silicon to Systems

The 35^th annual Synopsys User Group (SNUG) conference kicked off today in Silicon Valley with a keynote presentation by Synopsys president and CEO, Sassine Ghazi. Ghazi discussed the burgeoning era of pervasive intelligence and the incredible technology advancements that promise to improve human life — from early disease predictions and faster drug discovery to robots capable of reasoning and more.

Delivering these intelligent systems and the AI silicon that powers them is a colossal challenge, he cautioned. Engineers are facing unprecedented complexity and an increasingly rapid pace of innovation.  

To address these challenges, Ghazi said we must revolutionize engineering workflows, engines, and the underlying compute infrastructure.

Traditional workflows are no longer sufficient to handle the growing complexity and accelerated product cycles, which is why AI advancements for EDA — and engineering more broadly — are so critical.

Satya Nadella, Chairman and CEO of Microsoft, joined Ghazi’s keynote virtually to jointly explore potential avenues to advance AI for chip design, and the promise of agentic AI to augment engineering teams and further accelerate technology innovation. 

Synopsys pioneered AI as a core capability of modern chip design and continues to drive new AI advancements across the EDA stack. In his keynote, Ghazi shared the significant gains in quality and productivity Synopsys.ai solutions are providing for our customers today and discussed the expanding generative AI capabilities being delivered.

Our breakthrough knowledge assistant, Synopsys.ai Copilot, is now being used by our top customers, delivering productivity boosts ranging from 35 to 40 percent and even doubling productivity for a leading memory provider. What previously took hours of manual searching through documentation or waiting for expert engineer availability can now take minutes with Synopsys.ai Copilot, allowing newer engineers to work more independently in Synopsys tools while maintaining high quality standards. 

Ghazi said in addition to these assistive capabilities, Synopsys is delivering generative AI copilots for design collateral generation including register transfer level (RTL), test benches, formal assertions, and more. These creative AI capabilities are helping early access customers accelerate design and verification cycle times from days to hours and hours to minutes. 

Ghazi outlined an agentic AI development framework, drawing parallels to the automotive industry's transition from Advanced Driver-Assistance Systems (ADAS) to full autonomy. This framework envisions a progression from foundational AI capabilities to fully autonomous multi-agent systems capable of high-level decision-making and actions.

Ghazi said Synopsys is collaborating with key industry leaders like Microsoft and NVIDIA to develop differentiated, agentic capabilities with increasing levels of automation over time. He noted these agentic systems will augment, not replace, human engineers, helping R&D teams manage design complexity, accelerate innovation, and address the engineering workforce gap.

Holistic, AI-powered innovation

The future of engineering lies in a holistic, AI-powered, silicon-to-systems approach to innovation. Ghazi said Synopsys is at the forefront of this transformation or “re-engineering of engineering.” As we continue to pioneer AI-powered design solutions, the potential for agentic AI promises a future where intelligent systems are imagined by humans and designed in collaboration with AI agents — enabling greater speed, precision, and quality.