AI agents that run chip-design software can burn through a lot of tokens, and Cadence says it has a way to make them use fewer. The company introduced Maestro Monday morning, a portfolio of AI models trained specifically for semiconductor and system design, and said early results show up to 30% better quality of results with up to five times the token efficiency of a general-purpose foundation model.

Maestro sits underneath Cadence’s four “AI Super Agents,” AuraStack, ChipStack, InnoStack and ViraStack, which can route work between Maestro and outside frontier or open-weight models. The models include NVIDIA’s Nemotron, and the two companies are also working on agent security through NVIDIA’s OpenShell reference architecture , which NVIDIA introduced last week.

Where the work happens is the main split with Synopsys.…