Cadence Virtuoso is one of the most widely used EDA platforms for semiconductor and display layout design. If you’ve worked with Virtuoso, you’ve probably written SKILL code to automate repetitive tasks or extend your design environment.
Unfortunately, the SKILL development experience has changed very little over the years. Debugging is cumbersome, finding the right API often means digging through old manuals or scattered examples, and the overall workflow falls far behind what modern development environments provide.
That’s why I started the SkillUp project.
SkillUp is an open-source toolkit for Cadence SKILL developers. Rather than being “just another AI project,” its primary goal is to modernize the SKILL development experience and solve the problems that engineers encounter every day.
Currently, SkillUp focuses on the following core components.
Skill Book
Skill Book is a searchable documentation system for the SKILL language. Instead of relying solely on keyword searches, it helps developers quickly discover relevant APIs, examples, and related functions, making it much easier to learn and navigate the extensive SKILL API.
Skill Bot (Modern SKILL Editor & Debugger)
Skill Bot is a modern development environment designed specifically for the SKILL language. It includes code editing, lint-based diagnostics, and an integrated debugging experience.
One of the primary goals of Skill Bot is to improve the traditional SKILL debugging workflow. It provides a modern debugger that can be used without requiring an additional commercial license, giving developers a more familiar IDE-like experience with variable inspection, execution flow analysis, and easier debugging.
Skill Bot also includes a Smart API Finder. Instead of searching only by function name, developers can search by functionality or intent, discover related APIs, and immediately access practical usage examples. This significantly reduces the time spent looking for the right SKILL function.
Beyond Existing Tools
The SKILL ecosystem already includes useful projects such as SkillBridge, which have helped many engineers improve their workflows.
SkillUp builds on the same spirit while taking a different direction. Its goal is to provide a modern, integrated development experience that combines documentation, code editing, debugging, API discovery, and productivity tools into a single workflow.
The project is still evolving, and many additional tools are planned. The long-term vision is to modernize the entire SKILL development experience—from documentation and debugging to API exploration and automation—using development practices that today’s software engineers expect.
If you’re interested in modernizing your SKILL development workflow or would like to contribute to the project, check out the GitHub repository:
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