Cadence Virtuoso MCP servers and AI agent skills

How AI connects to Cadence Virtuoso

An MCP server or skill can only do what Cadence Virtuoso lets programs do. Cadence Virtuoso exposes 3 automation interfaces:

• SKILL (CIW, .cdsinit and IPC) (LISP): SKILL is the language Virtuoso executes itself: you type it into the Command Interpreter Window (CIW) or load .il files with load(), and it reaches schematics, layouts and Maestro. Every live integration here is a SKILL program that opens an IPC channel to an outside process, then evaluates whatever SKILL the agent sends, so you need a licensed Virtuoso session open. The SKILL and Virtuoso API references come with the installation and through Cadence Online Support. Documentation
• skillbridge (Python to SKILL) (Python): skillbridge is an LGPL-3.0 Python package (unihd-cag on GitHub) that calls Virtuoso SKILL functions from Python and converts SKILL objects to Python types. You load its IPC server into the SKILL console once per session. It needs IC 6.1.7, ICADV/M or later and Python 3.8 or newer, and several Virtuoso agent projects build on it. Documentation
• OCEAN and Spectre netlists (Input files): Simulation can also run outside the Virtuoso GUI. OCEAN scripts can drive Spectre runs and dump PSF results in a separate process, as the virtuoso-agent project does, and Spectre can be run directly on an exported netlist. virtuoso-bridge-lite runs Spectre without a Virtuoso daemon this way, and parses PSF waveforms for the agent.

What Cadence offers

Cadence presented ViraStack, an AI super agent for analog design and migration, at CadenceLIVE Silicon Valley in April 2026, paired with its Virtuoso AI Studio product. Cadence describes it as an agent inside its own tools; no public MCP server or third-party AI client support for Virtuoso was found as of this check.

Checked 4 Nov 2026. Sources: CadenceLIVE 2026, Can agentic AI finally crack 3D IC design automation? (Futurum), ViraStack AI Super Agent (Cadence)

What you can do with Cadence Virtuoso and AI

• Evaluate SKILL in a running Virtuoso session and read the result or CIW errors back, without typing in the CIW yourself.
• Inspect libraries, cells, symbol pins and PDK CDF parameters before the agent edits a schematic.
• Build or modify a schematic, then run schCheck and save, with explicit permission needed to replace an existing view.
• Run a Maestro test or a standalone Spectre simulation and return waveform previews with numeric statistics from the PSF results.
• Iterate design variables against a written spec, using the bridge's optimiser skill.

Taken from the listings' own documentation. Check each listing for exactly what it supports.

Installing

The listings here document setup for Claude Code and Cursor. Install steps, copied from each project's own documentation, are on each listing's page. Most Cadence Virtuoso integrations run on your own computer next to Cadence Virtuoso, so you need Cadence Virtuoso installed and licensed on the same machine unless the listing says otherwise.