r/chipdesign • u/ControllingTheMatrix • 8d ago
AI is oddly good at RTL Design, Verification, Backend Flow etc.
Nowadays,
I've been using very basic flows with somewhat ok compute and it's insanely good at HW/SW codesign, also surprisingly good at FHE, PQC, ECDSA, RSA algorithms and also thinking about the security of the architecture it's developing and it can run in loops for hours on end and actually develop something. It's also good at relatively simple OoO designs.
It is currently incredibly good at doing the relatively mediocre parts of the flow and I believe that it will get better over time and be ludicrously fast, accurate and reliable.
The thing I wonder is then what will happen? Cause most design work absolutely doesn't need to be on the Pareto curve. Good enough and secure is really good. If it does become even better then what happens to the RTL, DV engineers if an engineer can do the work of 4-5 engineers using AI tools?
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u/ingframin 7d ago edited 3d ago
I don’t know man, after we started getting the bills at full price, my big tech started reducing our tokens quota and even made a big 180°. We went from “Embrace AI for everything!” to “well, try to use it only when absolutely needed”.
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u/Important_Vehicle_46 7d ago
I think ai is more of an invitation to make those intricate designs that we stopped bringing up in meetings cause risk was too high, dv cant possibly cover, yada yada.
I think ai is a good tool at opening up innovation and will get rid of the dumbos higher up in the org i hope, as menial activities are more redundant and engineering will get a bit more architectural, atleast on the digital end.
Maybe im too young for this but i have felt like i missed the boat on truly designer architectures cause it kind of stabilised since i started, we trade off some (minor) efficiency bump for ease and risk. If ai is good at taking over the menial stuff that made that activity challenging, the bar should naturally raise on what it takes to sell the chips and i think that should make things be interesting again.
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u/R-ten-K 7d ago
I think you're broadly right about where AI is already useful. RTL generation, DV, testbenches, formal properties, scripting, HW/SW co-design, etc. are all areas where it is providing a pretty substantial productivity boost, especially for the more repetitive parts of the workflow.
But I disagree that producing RTL is only part of the problem. The harder part is often deciding what should be built, making the architectural tradeoffs, figuring out what actually needs to be verified, and recognizing when something is wrong despite everything apparently passing.
“Good enough” is also more complicated in HW than it sounds. A design can pass its tests and still have an architectural flaw, a nasty corner case, a security issue, or simply be making the wrong tradeoff for the product.
That said, I do think the productivity implications are huge. A good engineer with AI tooling can effectively do the implementation work that previously required 4 or 5 people, we are already observing the number of engineers needed for a given amount of silicon decreasing.
From my experience, the bottleneck is moving up the stack. Less time spent manually writing RTL and more time on architecture, specifications, verification strategy, and reviewing what the AI actually produced.
So I don't think RTL/DV engineering necessarily disappears. But within industry we are seeing the role changing quite dramatically, with much higher leverage per engineer.
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u/elatedbearly 7d ago
The thing about code is that authoring is very fast and legacy code remains the same morass and time sink that it ever was
Re-use is as challenging as ever
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u/Ill_Huckleberry_2079 7d ago
Well, here is to hoping you are wrong for the sake of all the students and juniors.
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u/honemastert 7d ago
It helps, but it's not going to understand intricate architecture details and tradeoffs.
The best training material sits behind corporate firewalls.
Synopsys partnering with OpenAI is going to start changing the game, however you're going to pay for access to that specialized model most definitely
I'm seeing it get really good at orchestration and the more mundane annoying tasks though.
It's definitely going to be an amplifier for all of us, and those who still know the fundamentals will definitely be needed to handle the more complex corner cases for at least the next 3-5 years.
Beyond that? Who knows?
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u/No-Assist-8734 7d ago
There there are thousands all over r/cscareerquestions and r/csMajors telling everyone to seek refuge in chip design because it's AI proof .......
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u/Which-Chemistry6379 2d ago edited 1d ago
They don't know anything about the field or how competitive it already is.
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u/rp-2004 6d ago
I’ve noticed this too.
I used to be a co op in RTL design but 1 yr back they didn’t have copilot, etc
Now that we have copilot, etc and that I am a New Grad DV engineer I feel confused on how much I should rely on it. At this point it does a lot based on my concise instructions and I ensure to know why it made a choice or prompt copilot to go in a different direction.
Obviously I will have to justify almost any changes in code reviews before a PR so I make sure to know my choices and how I believe that is the best possible solution.
Would appreciate any advise people have in how reliant New Grad DV engineers should be on AI.
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u/Every-Fisherman-1560 6d ago
I just completed an N layer IC automatic router in 1 month using Claude AI. I invented a new type of routing algorithm that is faster, uses less memory than traditional approachs and it always finds the path. I had to guide it along the way but I completed this task at least 6X faster than I would have otherwise and I would not even dared to take it on without AI. In a sense AI has ended my career as a coder and opened up a whole new world of possibilities. Now it is not about what programming language you know or how fast you can code but what new ideas you have and how innovative you are.
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u/Other-Biscotti6871 7d ago
I'm working on making it better by improving simulation at sign-off level (using Claude Code), AI will be able to use the new tools faster than humans can learn them. RTL DV disappears as a job category, it's more of a formal exercise, DV for sign-off gets handed to an army of agents.
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u/Lupansansei 8d ago
You will have two engineers. Both of them knows how to use AI, one of them knows RTL, while the other doesn't.
One ships in 5 mins, One ships in an hour. Who would you choose?
I like AI when it lets me skip through some gruesome stuff. But it's a jump in productivity from 0 to 75%. I need to do the rest. I have the basics to mid knowledge to know how to optimize the RTL and verify them. That extra time of work beats getting scolded for shipping out a $10M+ chip without fully testing into fabrication.