CORTEXA
← Browse
arxivcs.ARcs.AI2026-06-26

Agentic Hardware Design as Repository-Level Code Evolution

Cunxi Yu, Chenhui Deng, Nathaniel Pinckney, Brucek Khailany

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.

View free PDFSource page

Related papers

arxivcs.AIcs.ARcs.CR2026-07-28

ContractHIL-HLS: Contract-Aligned Multi-Agent Workflow with Hardware-in-the-Loop Feedback for HLS Design

Jingbo Zhang, Haoxiang Sun, Wenbo Wang, Wenbo Zhang

This paper presents ContractHIL-HLS, a contract-aligned multi-agent workflow for practical high-level synthesis (HLS) engineering. The workflow makes three contributions. First, it introduces a structured contract as the semantic-alignment and task-execution artifact that transla…

View free PDFSource page
arxivcs.ARcs.AIcs.DC2026-07-28

MDTransformer: A Hardware-Software Co-Design of Mode-Division Photonic Transformer Accelerator with Inverse-Designed Coherent Crossbar

Solomon Micheal Serunjogi, Rachmad Vidya Wicaksana Putra, Ayat Taha, Muhammad Shafique, Mahmoud Rasras

Recently, photonic transformer accelerators (PTAs) have successfully achieved significant speedup and energy efficiency improvements over electronic accelerators for expediting Transformer inference. However, state-of-the-art rely on expensive multi-wavelength light generation an…

View free PDFSource page
arxivcs.ARcs.AI2026-07-24

Sparse by Command: Task-Conditional Compute Skipping for Multi-Task Inference Accelerators

Afzal Ahmad, Gaoyu Mao, Shoubo Hu, Hui-Ling Zhen, Mingxuan Yuan, Xinyu Chen, et al.

Multi-task inference models share a single backbone across diverse tasks, yet execute identical computation regardless of which task is active - wasting energy and cycles on task-irrelevant operations. We observe that the task command, typically available before inference begins,…

View free PDFSource page
arxivcs.ARcs.AI2026-07-30

ARES: Adaptive Reasoning-Effort Steering for PPA- and Cost-Aware RTL Optimization with LLM Agents

Stef Cuyckens, Mihaela Jivanescu, Jun Yin, Chao Fang, Marian Verhelst

Large language model (LLM) agents optimize the power, performance, and area (PPA) of register-transfer-level (RTL) designs by iterating over edits, synthesis, and PPA analysis, paying a dollar cost for every LLM call. Prior agents report the quality reached without its normalized…

View free PDFSource page
arxivcs.ARcs.AIcs.LG2026-07-24

HiKV: Hierarchical Importance-Aware KV Cache with Hardware Acceleration for LLM Decoding

Chao Fang, Jun Yin, Man Shi, Marian Verhelst

With the rapid adoption of long-context large language models (LLMs), the continuously growing KV cache during decoding has become the critical memory bottleneck. To tackle this challenge, we propose HiKV, a novel algorithm-hardware co-design that exploits KV cache redundancy thr…

View free PDFSource page
arxivcs.LGcs.AIcs.ARcs.DCcs.PFstat.CO2026-07-24

Optimizing Transformer Neural Network for Real-Time Outlier Detection on FPGAs

Ilia Sobakinskikh, Paul Alexander Bilokon

In this work, we explore how the inference time of a Transformer Neural Network can be efficiently optimized with applications to real-time anomaly detection in financial time series. The financial time series are price series such as asset prices. Unfortunately, the data is ofte…

View free PDFSource page