Synopsys announced March 19 that it showcased AI and high-performance computing engineering innovations at Nvidia's GTC 2026, building on its strategic partnership with the chipmaker. Synopsys is the company that acquired global engineering simulation firm Ansys.
Design complexity, rising development costs, and pressure to shorten time-to-market are simultaneously intensifying across semiconductors, automotive, aerospace, and industrial sectors. These trends are exposing clear limitations of traditional engineering approaches. Synopsys is addressing these challenges by combining Nvidia's AI and accelerated computing technologies with its own design and simulation solutions, helping customers develop products faster and more efficiently.
At the event, Synopsys demonstrated an engineering environment integrating semiconductor design with multiphysics simulation, along with digital twin-based virtual prototyping technology. The company emphasized that verifying performance and behavior before building physical prototypes reduces development risk and accelerates timelines.
"Traditional engineering methods cannot keep pace with the complexity of today's software-defined intelligent systems," said Sassine Ghazi, CEO of Synopsys. "Synopsys is working with Nvidia and various partners to provide an engineering environment spanning the entire process from design to verification. We are helping customers design the future through co-design of semiconductor and multiphysics, acceleration of compute-intensive workloads, and digital twin-based virtual prototyping."
Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, said: "Together with Synopsys, we are combining Nvidia CUDA-X, Omniverse, and AI with the Synopsys platform to create a new engineering paradigm for the AI era and more effectively handle increasingly complex design environments."
Synopsys is building an agentic AI-based engineering environment applicable from silicon to systems in collaboration with Nvidia. The core approach uses Synopsys AgentEngineer technology to implement multi-agent workflows, integrating Nvidia Agent Toolkit, Nvidia NIM inference services, and Nemotron models to automate complex chip design tasks. At this GTC, Synopsys demonstrated the industry's first L4-level agentic EDA workflow, presenting a new direction for design automation.
Synopsys also introduced cases of implementing digital twins with multiphysics. Analog Devices (ADI) is using Synopsys multiphysics simulation software within Nvidia Omniverse and Isaac Sim environments to create digital twins for next-generation multimodal tactile sensor prototypes and next-generation robotic dexterity benchmarks. Synopsys's Ansys Mechanical software and AVxcelerate Sensor software delivered high-fidelity simulations of critical test bench components including cables, plugs, and sensor depth perception.