Agentic Hardware Design as Repository-Level Code Evolution

Designing computer chips is extraordinarily complex, requiring expertise across logic, timing, and physical layout — making it a compelling frontier for AI automation. HORIZON treats hardware design the same way modern AI treats software: as an evolving codebase that an agent can iteratively improve. By wrapping design tasks in a structured "project pack" with executable evaluators, the agent refines hardware descriptions through a self-correcting git-based loop, achieving full completion on several established benchmarks. Potential applications include dramatically accelerating chip design cycles, democratizing access to hardware engineering, and enabling autonomous exploration of hardware architectures for custom AI accelerators and embedded systems. Authors: Cunxi Yu, Chenhui Deng, Nathaniel Pinckney, Brucek Khailany Paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.28279v1