Agentic Hardware Design as Repository-Level Code Evolution

2026-06-26

AI Summary

This work addresses the lack of automated evolutionary capability in traditional hardware design flows, which hinders end-to-end autonomous optimization. The authors propose HORIZON, a novel framework that extends warehouse-scale self-evolution—previously limited to EDA tools—to the hardware design process itself by modeling design as code evolution within isolated Git working trees. HORIZON integrates Markdown-based knowledge encapsulation, executable evaluators, acceptance predicates, Git/runtime policies, and an autonomous agent loop to achieve a closed-loop, human-intervention-free hardware design evolution. Evaluated across ChipBench, RTLLM, Verilog-Eval, and nine CVDP benchmark categories, the approach achieves a 100% task completion rate, demonstrating its effectiveness in fully autonomous hardware synthesis and optimization.

Abstract

We present HORIZON, a self-evolving agent framework that treats hardware design as repository-level code evolution. A Markdown harness is compiled into a project pack containing domain knowledge, an executable evaluator, an acceptance predicate, and a git/runtime policy; a hands-free agent loop then evolves an isolated git worktree, using repository operations for state management, tracing, and replay. This extends prior works of repository-scale self-evolution from EDA software systems, to hardware-design artifacts themselves. We evaluate our approach on ChipBench, RTLLM, Verilog-Eval, and nine CVDP categories, achieving 100\% benchmark completion across all suites with a fully hands-free agentic loop. However, we do not claim that agentic AI for hardware design is solved: these benchmarks are controlled proxies for a much broader engineering problem in chip design. Section~\ref{sec:discuss} examines the limitations of the current study and highlights open research challenges.

Problem

• Agentic Hardware Design
• Repository-Level Code Evolution
• Hardware Design Automation
• Self-Evolving Agents
• Chip Design

Innovation

• agentic hardware design
• repository-level code evolution
• self-evolving agent
• git-based state management
• automated RTL synthesis