AI agent autonomously designs functional RISC-V CPU chip in 12 hours

Good news! This is only the beginning!

 
"AI autonomously designs functional CPU chip

 An agentic AI system autonomously designed a 1.48 gigahertz RISC-V CPU chip, roughly equivalent to a 2011-vintage Intel Celeron SU2300, from a 219-word specification, according to a paper by researchers at the AI chip design startup Verkor.

The resulting design has not been physically fabricated, but the authors verified it in simulation. The system took 12 hours to generate the design, in contrast to the typical timeline of 18 to 36 months. However, it consumed tens of billions of tokens and a team of up to 10 human experts likely would be required to implement the design. For AI developers, this demonstrates the potential for agentic workflows to compress hardware development timelines from months to hours, though significant hurdles remain." (Datapoints)

"AI chip design startup Verkor.io claims, in a research paper published in March, that its agentic AI system, Design Conductor, autonomously produced a complete RISC-V CPU core — taking a 219-word requirements document and generating a verified, layout-ready design in 12 hours, which is orders of magnitude faster than the standard 18- to 36-month timelines seen in commercial chip design. ..."

From the abstract:

"Design Conductor (DC) is an autonomous agent which applies the capabilities of frontier models to build semiconductors end-to-end -- that is, from concept to verified, tape-out ready GDSII (layout CAD file).

In 12 hours and fully autonomously, DC was able to build several micro-architecture variations of a complete RISC-V CPU (which we dub VerCore) that meet timing at 1.48 GHz (rv32i-zmmul; using the ASAP7 PDK), starting from a 219-word requirements document.

The VerCore achieves a CoreMark score of 3261. For historical context, this is roughly equivalent to an Intel Celeron SU2300 from mid-2011 (which ran at 1.2 GHz). To our knowledge, this is the first time an autonomous agent has built a complete, working CPU from spec to GDSII.  ..."

AI agent designs a complete RISC-V CPU from a 219-word spec sheet in just 12 hours — comparably simple design required 'many tens of billions of tokens'

Design Conductor: An agent autonomously builds a 1.5 GHz Linux-capable RISC-V CPU (preprint, open access)