Synopsys (Nasdaq: SNPS) and OpenAI said they have signed a multi-year agreement to work together as preferred partners on GPT-Synopsys, a specialised model for chip design. Under the agreement, OpenAI will license Synopsys' electronic design automation (EDA) tools to develop the model, and the two companies will collaborate on research and development and on joint go-to-market work under a shared revenue framework, the companies said.
The companies said the model is intended to learn to run Synopsys' EDA tools as an expert engineer would, interpreting the tools' outputs and iterating on designs, so that engineers can examine more design alternatives and optimise power, performance and area. Sassine Ghazi, Synopsys' president and chief executive, said the agreement is meant to widen access to the company's design capabilities and to the engineering tools needed to bring increasingly complex chips to market, while keeping the rigour and trust that manufacturing requires.
GPT-Synopsys will run on OpenAI-hosted infrastructure, is to be designed to work with customers' agent harness systems and will be integrated with Synopsys.ai and the Synopsys Autopilot agentic AI platform, the companies said. Early technology engagements are under way with semiconductor customers. The joint offering bundles compute, model and licences, and customer design data is not used to train the model, is encrypted at rest and in transit, and can be managed through configurable retention, audit and permission controls.
Greg Brockman, president and co-founder of OpenAI, said the company is applying its technology to the systems that power AI and, with Synopsys, is bringing that work to chip design to help engineers explore more designs and reach a working chip faster, adding that better chips allow better AI to reach more people.
