Adventures in Chip Design

Foundry capacity and system integration, not AI-EDA tooling, will determine which AI chip startups actually succeed.

• LLMs writing RTL: John reports LLMs are getting surprisingly good at one-shotting small chip design blocks in RTL (Register Transfer Level), despite little training data existing for it.
• Hallucination-like gaps persist: Models can't yet replicate the intuition of a veteran chip designer (e.g. OpenAI's Richard Ho) about "what might go wrong"—critical for verification.

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