We always enjoy participating in the annual DAC show, which this year was held a few weeks ago in Long Beach, California for the first time. This year was particularly exciting because we had so many new features and products to present and demonstrate. I recently discussed our new IDS-NoC™ solution, which adds a network on chip to our options for bus interconnects on your chip. The other big news at DAC was the introduction of IDS-AI™, our new agentic AI framework that automates your chip development from specification all the way to sign-off.
We Embrace AI to Help Our Users
Like a lot of people, we’ve been following the rapid evolution of AI technology in recent years with great interest. But we’ve done more than that: we include AI features in our products and solutions whenever and wherever they can help our users develop better chips and reusable IP blocks. In fact, it’s been nearly five years since we announced our first AI-driven innovation: the iSpec.ai site that converts English specifications of design intent into SystemVerilog Assertions (SVA) suitable for simulation or formal verification.
Since then, we’ve devoted significant engineering resources to tracking AI and adding to our products features that make sense. IDS-AI is our first product completely powered by AI. Its framework understands semiconductor design intent and drives the entire development flow from golden specification creation to RTL sign-off. It automates specification creation, RTL generation, verification, and validation in one connected workflow, helping your teams catch defects earlier and reach sign-off faster with correct-by-construction accuracy.
IDS-AI is the industry’s first agentic AI framework built specifically for semiconductor development. It understands your design functional specification, your control and status registers (CSRs), your programming sequences, your system-on-chip (SoC) hierarchy, and your block interconnections. From these specifications, we drive your entire RTL flow. It’s built on our IDesignSpec™ Suite, which has been refined over the past two decades of production use, so you get the reasoning and productivity of AI with the certainty and accuracy of proven development tools.
One Unified AI Layer across the Agnisys Suite
If you follow Agnisys at all, you know that we offer a broad solution for specification automation. We generate RTL designs, SVA, Universal Verification Methodology (UVM) tests and testbenches, C/C+ headers and tests, hybrid UVM/C/C++ testbenches, and high-quality documentation. We provide a complete solution for your CSRs and chip-level integration. When we began working on an agentic AI layer to further automate our solution, we wanted to be sure that we could cover the complete scope of what we offer today.
As the diagram above shows, IDS-AI spans RTL, verification, pre-silicon validation, chip integration and assembly, post-silicon validation in the bring-up lab, and documentation. Some users extend our scope even further, using our generated tests for automated test equipment (ATE) in chip manufacturing and as building blocks for their production drivers and embedded software. The power of AI makes all this specification automation even faster and easier than ever. If you like what we’ve been doing to help you, you’re going to love how IDS-AI makes it even better.
IDS-AI is built around an agentic AI engine that works across the complete IDesignSpec Suite in a single, connected context. You don’t need to worry about the details of which tools perform which steps in your development process. The AI agent coordinates our underlying tools automatically, carrying out complex, multi-step engineering tasks with minimal manual effort. IDS-AI is AI-platform agnostic; your teams can use our built-in platform, or plug in a platform of your own. IDS-AI supports both on-site and remote usage for maximum flexibility.
Key Agentic AI Capabilities
IDS-AI accelerates your specification development with AI-powered creation, verification, validation, and a self-correcting loop that continuously improves specification quality by detecting and resolving issues automatically:
- Create and manage your functional specifications, including CSRs and sequences, in a collaborative environment using intuitive text-based and graphical interfaces
- Analyze your specifications for completeness, correctness, consistency, and integrity
- Run a self-correcting loop that automatically corrects IDS-Batch™-reported warnings and errors across supported specification formats, including SystemRDL and IDS-CF™ templates
You can go from your golden specifications to implementation-ready RTL design faster, with less manual work and fewer integration errors, whether you’re working with IDS-generated logic, existing IP, or hand-written RTL:
- Automatically generate implementation-ready RTL directly from your golden specifications
- Interconnect all RTL from all sources, ensuring that generated and user-created content remains synchronized and consistent
- Perform intelligent logic assembly and connectivity based on natural-language instructions
IDS-AI reduces your verification and validation effort and accelerates sign-off through AI-powered automation that generates complete environments and ensures 100% CSR coverage:
- Automatically generate verification testbenches and tests
- Extend verification automation to full-chip verification, including user logic and application-specific functionality
- Generate pre-silicon validation environments and tests
Finally, note that every file generated at every step remains synchronized with your golden specifications throughout your project, providing a single source of truth throughout your development process.
Summary
IDS-AI provides a streamlined, specification-driven flow that enables your engineering teams to move from golden specification to sign-off faster, with higher quality and much less manual effort. You catch specification issues early, long before implementation begins, and automate much of your development. You’ll benefit from greatly improved engineering productivity and a much higher chance of first-silicon success. I encourage you to check out IDS-AI and the rest of our solution to see how Agnisys can help you.
