Cognichip launched ACI Enterprise on September 14, saying its chip-design platform is operating across more than 40 engagements with semiconductor companies, including Renesas and SiTime. CEO Faraj Aalaei announced the launch at the NYSE in a company post on X.
The company describes ACI Enterprise as a full-stack intelligence infrastructure for chip design that combines physics-grounded AI models with end-to-end workflows. Aalaei said Cognichip built its AI stack on those models because general-purpose LLM wrappers could not meet chip design's mathematical and precision requirements.
Cognichip also named an Altera FPGA ecosystem partnership in its launch announcement. Cognichip said in April that its ACI platform was engaged with more than 30 semiconductor companies, including several among the industry's top 20.
In an unnamed top-20 fabless-company benchmark cited by Cognichip, one engineer used ACI to process a 55-page specification and complete micro-architecture, RTL design, functional verification and power-performance-area optimization for an advanced ASIC in a few days. Cognichip said the conventional process would require a full front-end design team and four to five months.
Founded in 2024 by semiconductor veterans and AI researchers, Cognichip is headquartered in Redwood City, California. The company has raised $93 million from Mayfield Fund, Lux Capital, FPV Ventures, Seligman Ventures, SBI Investment and Candou Ventures.
TechCrunch identified ChipAgents and Ricursive as competitors pursuing AI-driven chip design, alongside Synopsys and Cadence Design Systems.
