By Stephen Nellis
SANTA CLARA, California, April 15 (Reuters) - Cadence Design Systems and Nvidia are partnering to further the development of artificial intelligence for robots, the CEOs of the two companies said on Wednesday.
Cadence, which is one of the major suppliers of the software used in designing advanced computing chips, is working with Nvidia to integrate its physics engines, which predict how real-world materials interact, with Nvidia AI models designed to train robots inside computer simulations.
"We're working with you across the board on robotic systems," Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said at a conference hosted by Cadence in Santa Clara, California.
Training robots inside such simulations can be faster than training them in the real world, but the training data for doing so is not readily available and must be generated by software such as Cadence's physics engines. The goal of the collaboration, the two CEOs said, is to shrink the time needed for robots to carry out useful tasks.
"The more accurate (generated training data) is, the better the model will be," said Cadence CEO Anirudh Devgan.
Cadence shares were up more than 4%.
Cadence also said on Wednesday it is introducing a new AI agent that will take on some of the tasks that human engineers perform to design chips.
Earlier this year, Cadence introduced an agent that handles the early phases of designing a chip, in which the chip's circuit is designed in a language that looks like computer code. On Wednesday, Cadence said a new agent would handle the later stages in which that circuit is laid out as a physical design on a piece of silicon, and that the system will become available on Alphabet's Google Cloud.
"We help build AI systems, and then those AI systems can help improve the design process," Devgan said.
(Reporting by Stephen Nellis in Santa Clara, CaliforniaEditing by Nick Zieminski, Rod Nickel)
