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Immense forces are coalescing.
And the impact will be felt across industries and engineering disciplines.
This defining theme was on full display at Synopsys Converge 2026, the newly united conference that brings together Synopsys User Group (SNUG), Ansys Simulation World, and Synopsys Executive Forum under one banner.
In his opening keynote, Synopsys President and CEO Sassine Ghazi laid bare both the moment at hand and the path ahead:
“We are entering the most transformative decade in modern engineering,” he said. “And it will be defined not by isolated technology breakthroughs, but by the unprecedented convergence of silicon, software, systems, and physics.”
Ghazi framed the next ten years as a period when multiple megatrends reach inflection points at the same time — AI, autonomous mobility, robotics, quantum computing, sustainable energy, and the exponential demand for processing performance and efficiency.
Each one, he noted, accelerates the others. AI boosts robotics. Robotics enables space and industrial automation. Nuclear fusion and battery advancements will power them all.
Following the historic and market-altering acquisition that was completed in 2025, Synopsys and Ansys are now addressing this convergence as a single, unified company.
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A convergence of technology leaders
AI is no longer confined to purely digital realms. We are now entering the age of physical AI, where “bits meet atoms,” said Ghazi, and intelligent systems must operate predictably in an unpredictable world.
Across industries, R&D teams are facing an unprecedented rise in complexity, cost, and demand for faster time-to-market. These pressures are compounding as products and systems become increasingly software-defined, silicon-powered, and AI-enabled.
Whether it’s a humanoid robot, an autonomous vehicle, or a next-generation data center, building the systems of tomorrow requires tightly integrated, holistic engineering across multiple domains: electronics, mechanics, fluids, optics, materials, thermals, and more.
Traditional methodologies — which are largely siloed, component-centric, and dependent on physical prototypes — no longer suffice. What’s needed, Ghazi argued, is a fundamental shift to multidisciplinary, silicon-to-system co-design.
This is where the combined power of Synopsys and Ansys becomes a game changer.
As a newly integrated company, Synopsys now brings together the industry’s leading portfolio across electronic design automation (EDA), semiconductor IP, and multiphysics simulation and analysis. This breadth of capability, Ghazi said, provides the connective tissue between silicon and systems. And it uniquely positions Synopsys to help organizations re-engineer how next-generation, AI-powered products are designed, verified, and delivered.
That vision came into sharper focus through a series of announcements at Synopsys Converge 2026:
- Multiphysics Fusion™ Technology: the first wave of integrated Synopsys–Ansys solutions that brings Ansys’ gold-standard analysis capabilities directly into the Synopsys EDA portfolio. Initial focus areas include timing signoff, multi-die, design closure, and analog, with early access customers already evaluating the technology ahead of broader availability in the coming months.
- First major Ansys-focused product release since the acquisition: delivering new cross-domain workflows in photonics, materials, and system-to-silicon safety; expanded digital twin and environment-modeling capabilities; and new generative and agentic AI features that accelerate early exploration, automate preprocessing, and deepen system-level insight.
- Software-defined hardware-assisted verification (HAV): advances across the HAV portfolio delivering up to 2× performance and 3× debug productivity, new HAPS-200 and ZeBu-200 12-FPGA systems, and modular scaling that doubles ZeBu Server 5 capacity for AI-era designs.
- Synopsys Electronics Digital Twin (eDT) Platform: an open, cloud-ready platform that enables up to 90% of automotive software validation to occur before hardware is available, significantly reducing development cost, risk, and time-to-market.
Underlying these announcements was a consistent theme: co-design is no longer optional.
Ghazi emphasized both horizontal co-design — concurrently modeling multiple physics domains — and vertical co-design, where software, silicon, and interface IP are optimized together. Interface IP, in particular, has emerged as a critical enabler for AI systems, forming the data foundation that connects chips across cloud, edge, and endpoint environments.
Synopsys President and CEO Sassine Ghazi at Synopsys Converge 2026
A convergence of industry luminaries
Ghazi was joined on stage by NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang, who underscored the need for deep, accurate simulation and end-to-end workflows as AI systems grow more complex and physically grounded.
“Whatever you simulate has to be accurate at the physics level,” Huang said. “Sim-to-real accuracy is essential.”
The jovial banter between Huang and Ghazi reinforced the longstanding and recently expanded partnership between Synopsys and NVIDIA, which is aimed at reshaping how intelligent systems are engineered — from accelerated simulation to digital twins to advanced co‑design.
“We work from the top down, bottom up, inside out, and outside in, all at the same time,” Huang said. “That’s extreme co-design.”
Another recurring theme throughout the keynote was engineer productivity. As systems become software-defined, AI-enabled, and physically embodied, the complexity of engineering is growing faster than engineering headcount. Agentic AI, Ghazi argued, will play a critical role in bridging that gap.
“I’m delighted to partner deeply with you in this area,” Huang told Ghazi, noting engineering capacity — not technology — is now the primary constraint on innovation. “Every one of our engineers will have a whole bunch of Synopsys agents working with them, specialized in different parts of the design.”
Synopsys President and CEO Sassine Ghazi and NVIDIA Founder and CEO Jensen Huang at Synopsys Converge 2026
The industry’s first L4 multi-agent, adaptive learning workflow for chip design was showcased at Synopsys Converge 2026. Powered by AgentEngineer™ technology and already being used by beta customers, the workflow includes agents that reason, learn, plan, and act across design and verification tasks — translating specifications into RTL, generating testbenches, and iterating toward clean, synthesizable results.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella appeared via prerecorded video to discuss the evolution of engineering workflows and the deepening Synopsys–Microsoft collaboration.
“It’s unbelievable the rate of progress that you’ve been making,” Nadella said. “All the engineering you’ve done in EDA — building the scaffolding and harness for generative AI — is what’s going to make AgentEngineers the next big driver of productivity. And the world needs that.”
As prototyping shifts from physical to virtual environments, digital twins are becoming essential engineering tools across industries — pulling simulation, software optimization, and system-level validation to earlier phases of the development lifecycle.
AMD CTO Mark Papermaster weighed in via prerecorded video, emphasizing how co-design across multiple physics domains is becoming essential to push multi-die silicon performance, improve reliability, and reduce margins and time-to-market.
“When we build today’s most complex multi-die, 2.5D, and 3D chiplet-based designs, we are optimizing across the full system from the very start. Architecture, silicon implementation, packaging, and software all move together,” Papermaster said. “That co-design increasingly spans multiple physical domains: power, performance, thermals, signal integrity, mechanical stresses, and long-term reliability.”
In a prerecorded video, Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan underscored the essential role of multiphysics analysis as semiconductor design approaches the Angstrom Era.
“To reduce design margins and deliver the highest performance and most efficient silicon, multiphysics analysis is critical,” Tan said. “Intel and Synopsys have a longstanding partnership — from bringing advances in silicon technology to powering data centers and physical AI. We are excited to continue our strong partnership with Synopsys into the Angstrom Era with our collaboration on Intel 18A, 14A, and beyond.”
Synopsys President and CEO Sassine Ghazi at Synopsys Converge 2026
Re-engineering the future
Ghazi closed with a call to action for the entire ecosystem. Delivering the next era of intelligent systems, he said, will require closer collaboration across silicon designers, systems engineers, software teams, and ecosystem partners.
“At Synopsys, our mission is to empower innovators to drive human advancement,” he said.
As we embark on a decade of unprecedented convergence, the opportunity to “re-engineer the future” is within reach. Those who connect disciplines, collaborate across domains, and embrace new design paradigms will lead. And they will help shape a future where technology amplifies creativity, tackles societal challenges, and unlocks new potential for humanity.
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Engineering for the Exponential Complexity of Physical AI
