From shoes to GPUs; super agents; TSMC, ASML results; new chiplets and test facilities; Stanford AI index; photonics deals; compute architecture hall of fame; teens for chips; AI security; automotive edge data architecture; mid $20k e-truck; magnesium battery progress. Cadence expanded its portfolio of ChipStack AI agents with a head agent designed to orchestrate all aspects of semiconductor and system design, along with agents specialized for custom and analog, and for digital implementation and signoff. Cadence is also collaborating with Nvidia to combine agentic AI, physics-based simulation, and digital twins for semiconductor and physical AI engineering, and with Google to integrate Super Agent with Gemini on Google Cloud. Fig.1: Cadence CEO Anirudh Devgan and Jensen Huang discussing AI’s impact at CadenceLive this week. Fig.2: Accelerating AI capability. Source: Stanford 2026 AI Index Report [Ref. 1] Quick links to more news: Global In-Depth Reports and Deals New Technologies Security Vehicles, Batteries Workforce, Education Research Events and Further Reading Semiconductor Engineering published the Manufacturing, Packaging and Materials newsletter this week: Plus: Onto Innovation‘s recently released Dragonfly G5 inspection platform is now qualified for 2.5D AI packaging applications. Intel launched its 18A process node-built Core Series 3 mobile processors for small businesses and edge use cases. Athena introduced a new agentic AI tool, FabOrchestrator, for smart manufacturing in the fab and other environments. In a recent tech talk, D2S‘ Aki Fujimura talks about how far the industry has come in terms of computational resources and multi-beam mask writing to facilitate the move to curvilinear masks and design. Nvidia released a family of open AI models for quantum processor calibration and quantum error-correction decoding. Meta shared details of its second-gen Meta Training and Inference Accelerator (MTIA) chip designed for large-scale infrastructure. Meta will also partner with Broadcom to co-develop multiple generations of the MTIA