Verilog

Yeah.

But there was no Verilog.

Mm-hmm.

So we invented HDL, right? The Intel hardware description language.

Mm-hmm

... you know, wr- writing kernels.

A lot of the, uh, I, I think a lot of the sort of being able to specify the, the objectives at a higher level, which then gets sort of translated into Verilog, right?

Mm-hmm.

Well, I don't know about products, right? I think methodologies have to be changed because what we talked about in the past two episodes, right? We, uh, definitely see a change of focus, right? Starting with how we are writing our specification codes, how we are writing the code, how we are testing it, and so on and so forth, right? So we-

Do, do you think languages wouldn't change, Verilog, SystemVerilog, UVM, um, anything around languaging or flows or how we debug or how we place and route? I mean, any specific, um, I don't know, lints, any specific, uh, products that, you know, might be done better with LLMs or agents?

Yeah.

I think we're likely to see a move towards higher level, descriptive hardware languages.

And then finally, like the, the biggest thing for Positron was I've been trying with every single new model release to have these models be able to like actually take a relatively simple logic design Problem, you know, implementing a, a encryption block in this case, and being able to take that through the full RTL to GDS flow.

So from basically the specification of do this encryption function, implement the Verilog, so the hardware description language for that.

So write that code, and then be able to take that code and go through all the way until you have got a chip design that theoretically you could go tape out.

LLMs could do different portions of that and could, like, write the scripts and, you know, fail a lot of different midpoints on the way.

There's, you got, uh, digital circuits, you got analog circuits, and you got memory.

And, um, digital circuits are largely coded today, right? You write Verilog reg- it's RTL.

It's a, it's basically code that you guys would probably understand.

If I showed it to you, you'd probably get to some extent what's going on there.

Um, I will say that AI is completely changing the way we're, you know, approaching a lot of this, or at least it, it will dramatically change things.

So, um, a, a lot of the same uses that you're seeing with coding agents on the software side apply to the hardware side.

So we can generate Verilog, we can generate digital circuits using AI agents, but there's a whole bunch of other uses there that, that, um, that are exciting.

So I do think that hardware design is going through a, the, the design flow is going through a bit of a revolution that's gonna, uh, who knows where it will go, but it's gonna be a fun few years.

Mm-hmm.

When it comes to hardware, uh, like let's say you have every single file that allows to build the circuit, Verilog file, GDS and so on.

So, uh, plenty of, uh, steps in the manufacturing of, uh, of the circuit.

Let's say you have all of this on your, uh, computer.