AI agent designs a complete RISC-V CPU from a 219-word spec sheet in just 12 hours

Abstraction: Verkor Design Conductor autonomously produces verified RISC-V CPU in 12 hours

Key points:

• Verkor.io's Design Conductor agentic system produced a complete RISC-V CPU (VerCore) from a 219-word spec to GDSII layout in 12 hours — first claimed fully autonomous spec-to-layout run
• VerCore is a 5-stage pipelined in-order single-issue core; met timing at 1.48 GHz on ASAP7 7nm PDK; scored 3,261 on CoreMark (compared to Intel Celeron SU2300)
• Agent independently chose a Booth-Wallace multiplier (2.57 GHz) and a one-cycle branch penalty after testing both one-cycle and two-cycle variants
• Required "many tens of billions of tokens"; costs estimated at $50k–$60M depending on model pricing; compute grows non-linearly with design complexity
• Limitations: not physically fabricated (verified in Spike simulator only); agent sometimes reasoned about Verilog as sequential code; 5-10 human experts still needed for production
• Standard commercial chip design takes 18-36 months with teams of hundreds and $400M+ for leading-edge chips

Connections: Verkor · AI Agents · Chip Design · Agentic Coding

Source: https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intelligence/ai-agent-designs-a-complete-risc-v-cpu-from-a-219-word-spec-in-just-12-hours