March 12, 2026 - In recent years, chip design complexity and cost have increased exponentially. SoC chip design involves dozens of EDA tools and hundreds of engineering steps, while chip performance requirements continue to improve and time-to-market is increasingly compressed.
Against this backdrop, traditional design models relying on manual tuning and tool-driven approaches are gradually approaching efficiency bottlenecks.
RigorAI
Recently, RigorAI, an EDA company specializing in digital circuit design and optimization, officially released its AI-driven chip design system. This system integrates large model technology, intelligent agent systems, and automated workflows to build a next-generation AI-driven chip design platform, significantly improving design efficiency and engineering productivity.
Three years of planning laid the foundation for a leapfrog development
At the start of the new year, the concept of AI-automated chip design has garnered significant global attention. Ricursive, a US-based company, achieved a $4 billion valuation just two months after its founding, demonstrating the industry's immense expectations for this direction.
However, as early as three years ago, Rigor Design had already begun its strategic deployment around chip workflow automation, chip data analysis, extraction, and management, successively launching products such as RigorFlow workflow management and the Rigor series of approval analysis tools. These products laid the foundation for the introduction of AI capabilities. Related products have already been implemented in numerous companies and have received positive feedback from customers.
Dr. Lin Yizhou, CEO of Rigor Design, stated: "The process tools and data systems that Rigor developed in its early stages were preparing the data fuel for AI capabilities. We initially prepared for deep learning-based AI, and with the rapid advancements in LLM technology in the past two years, our product roadmap is highly aligned with the evolution of AI technology. This involves both forward-looking planning and a bit of luck. Based on years of product development, the RigorAI system aims to make AI a 'super assistant' for chip companies, providing decision support and automation capabilities for all stages of the design process."
Meticulously designed for chip design scenarios
The RigorAI system consists of three parts: a workflow platform, an agent and knowledge base platform, and a chip data platform. As an emerging technology, agents have many shortcomings in terms of security, stability, and controllability. The currently popular OpenClaw has exposed many vulnerabilities.
The RigorAI system was designed from the outset specifically for chip enterprise scenarios, considering user needs in data security, access control, and system stability. The system supports enterprise-level private deployment and has built a comprehensive security control mechanism to help enterprises leverage AI productivity.
RigorFlow: Efficiently Managing Intelligent Workflows
If the large-scale model is the "brain" of chip design, then automated workflows are the "hands" that execute the tasks. The RigorAI workflow system can automatically schedule EDA tools, run design flows, and generate analysis results, freeing engineers from frequent script modifications or manual task management.
Through automated and visual process management, the number of design flows an engineer can manage simultaneously has increased from two or three to dozens, significantly improving efficiency.
RigorAgent: Comprehensive Support for the Design Process
The Agent platform not only creates a variety of specialized intelligent agents, such as PR optimization agents, FP agents, and DRC repair agents, but also allows enterprise users to build multi-agent collaborative systems according to their own needs, enabling AI to automatically handle complex design tasks.
The platform also provides engineers with an expert knowledge base for EDA tools, offering unbiased professional answers to chip design questions and automatically building a continuously evolving enterprise-level private knowledge base, significantly reducing the time spent manually reviewing documents and troubleshooting issues.
RigorDB: A Data Foundation Designed Intelligently
Data is both a core foundation for management decisions and AI-driven processes. RigorDB is an intelligent database system for chip design workflows. It uniformly manages the hierarchical data, versions, and logs in the workflow of chips, providing project managers with various natural language query capabilities, such as automated extraction, multi-dimensional analysis, and visualization charts, providing flexible data support for decision-making.
Supporting the domestic ecosystem
The RigorAI system is deeply integrated into the domestic semiconductor ecosystem, serving not only numerous domestic chip design companies, but also closely connected with the domestic ecosystem in its own development, forming an open platform.
The system is adapted to and improves efficiency with domestic GPUs, and actively supports the integration and use of domestic EDA tools, becoming a part of the independent and controllable chip ecosystem.
Regarding the design of the Nikkei chip
Founded in 2021, Riguang Chip Design is a domestic EDA company focusing on intelligent chip design across the entire process, dedicated to reshaping chip design productivity through AI technology. The company has attracted investment from multiple industry players, including Yuanhe Puhua and Skyworth Investment. Its founders and core R&D team possess over 20 years of EDA R&D experience, continuously driving the development of domestic EDA technology.
Source: Semiconductor Industry Observer
