Cadence Design Systems has unveiled an agentic AI system called Orastack to support printed circuit board (PCB) design and testing for electrical engineers.

The Register reported on July 15 that Orastack supports PCB design and advanced packaging design and test work that has relied on high-precision simulation. Cadence drew a line, saying the tool is not replacing existing tools with AI models that can hallucinate.

Orastack is similar to Anthropic Claude Code or OpenAI Codex, but it is designed to orchestrate Cadence's existing test and simulation suites rather than write, compile, debug and run C or Rust code.

Michael Jackson (마이클 잭슨), senior vice president of Cadence's System Design and Analysis division, said, "AI is increasing the value of engineering products and technologies."

Orastack links with a range of open and proprietary models and is based on a natural-language interface. It enables planning and orchestration of complex multi-stage circuit design and test workflows that perform high-precision calculations with CPUs, GPUs and other accelerators.

Cadence has not applied AI only to chip design or advanced packaging. It also built similar agents for digital and analog chip design.