April 17 (Reuters) - Cadence Design Systems ( CDNS ) on

Wednesday introduced the latest version of supercomputer based

around a custom computing chip designed to speed up the creation

of other computing chips and the software that will run on them.

Cadence makes software that Nvidia ( NVDA ), Apple ( AAPL )

and many other companies use to design chips with billions of

transistors, the tiny on-off switches that make computers work.

That design process can take a year or more.

Companies like Nvidia ( NVDA ), whose software offerings are as

important to its overall business as its chips, do not want to

wait that long to start writing code for the chips.

The two upgraded systems Cadence introduced on Wednesday,

called Palladium Z3 and Protium X3, create a virtual version of

a chip to start writing software while waiting for the physical

chip to come back from the factory. Such emulation has become a

key reason tech companies can deliver products at a faster pace.

"These systems are no good without software," Cadence CEO

Anirudh Devgan said in an interview with Reuters. "The general

public doesn't realize how critical these tools are to the

design of all these electronics."

Cadence executives said Nvidia ( NVDA ) is already testing some of

the new Cadence systems that can emulate chips twice as large as

the previous generation of systems, which Nvidia ( NVDA ) used to design

its just-announced Blackwell chips.

"Palladium is the only appliance that's more important to me

than the refrigerator," Nvidia ( NVDA ) Chief Executive Jensen Huang said

at an event in Santa Clara, California, announcing the new

Cadence systems. "It is the single most important appliance in

my life. We are the largest installation of Palladiums

anywhere."

The heart of Cadence's Palladium emulation systems is itself

a custom computing chip that Cadence used its own tools to

design. The chip is as large and complex as some of Nvidia's ( NVDA ) AI

chips.

"For emulation you need to design your own chip, and we have

a 10-year lead on anybody else who even attempts to design their

own emulator," Devgan said.