“How AI is Reshaping Semiconductor Design and the Emerging Questions around Human Inventorship”

The semiconductor industry's embrace of agentic AI is forcing companies to rethink how inventorship will be established under U.S. patent law. In the July/August issue of Semiconductor Digest, Marshall Gerstein Partner Stephen Kudla explores how the rapid adoption of “agentic” AI systems is transforming semiconductor design and creating new challenges under U.S. patent law. 

As AI takes on increasingly autonomous design functions, Stephen explains why companies should begin documenting human contributions more carefully to preserve patent rights and prepare for evolving inventorship standards.

Stephen explains that the spread of agentic design tools does not necessarily threaten that advantage, but it can complicate the paperwork. “Documentation habits built for the pre-agentic era are probably insufficient,” he writes. “When an engineer manually wrote RTL, the design notebook told the inventorship story almost automatically. When an agent writes it after interpreting a spec, the story requires more deliberate telling. Teams will need records that capture not just what was built but what human decisions shaped it.”

Ultimately, Stephen concludes, “The semiconductor industry has always been defined by its willingness to solve problems that seem, from a few years out, genuinely insoluble. The inventorship question is not insoluble, but it will reward the companies that treat it as an engineering problem rather than a legal afterthought.”

Read the full article in the digital edition of Semiconductor Digest.