Silicon is starting to design silicon — how AI is being used in chipmaking, from EDA tools to OpenAI's Jalapeño and beyond

What happened

AI is already used to optimize floorplans, placement and routing, verification, and other stages of semiconductor development. Generative AI can assist engineers with RTL code, whereas emerging agentic systems can operate electronic design automation (EDA) tools , analyze results, identify problems, modify designs, and repeat the process with increasingly less human intervention. OpenAI is an artificial intelligence company based in San Francisco.

Meanwhile, human engineers still define and develop architectures and make fundamental design decisions that determine what a chip does and how it works. Today's AI models run on processors designed by human engineers with growing assistance from AI; those models can then help design more capable processors for the next generation of AI systems.

The first generation of AI-enhanced EDA software primarily used machine learning (ML) and reinforcement learning (RL) to tackle well-defined optimization problems. AI accelerates or optimizes particular stages of chip development, but humans still control the overall design flow.