By Anton Shilov
Publication Date: 2026-04-14 09:52:00
Nvidia says it is trying to introduce artificial intelligence to every stage of the chip design process, drastically reducing development time. Notably, the company has revealed that porting a standard cell library, a task that previously took eight engineers 10 months to complete, can now be done overnight by a single GPU. However, the company’s chief scientist, William Dally, says that artificial intelligence is still not quite close to designing a processor completely by itself.
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Nvidia is already using AI across multiple stages of chip design, from circuit-level optimizations to system-level exploration, and achieves orders-of-magnitude productivity gains and, in some cases, better-than-human results, according to Dally.
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At the lowest level, AI has already transformed standard cell development, one of the most time-consuming steps when transitioning to a new fabrication process. Porting a standard cell library of roughly 2,500–3,000 cells previously required a team of eight engineers working for about 10 months, according to Dally. Nvidia has replaced this work with a reinforcement learning system called…
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