Presentation
From Vibe Coding to Silicon: Engineering Agentic Systems for Hardware Design
DescriptionLarge language models are moving beyond chat interfaces into agentic systems capable of executing complex engineering workflows. Achieving reliable, production-quality outcomes — especially in hardware design — requires disciplined system design, not prompting tricks. This three-hour tutorial takes participants from agentic system fundamentals to a concrete hardware-oriented outcome. In the first phase, attendees learn how to design agentic workflows: defining agents, building custom tools, decomposing tasks, managing context and state, and implementing feedback loops that enable self-correction under ambiguity. In the second phase, the tutorial bridges standard C code and optimized high-level synthesis (HLS) through a structured refinement prompting workflow, where users provide behavioral code alongside hardware constraints such as latency, throughput, and area. Using a 4-bit modular processor and a systolic-array ML accelerator as benchmarks, the tutorial shows how a code agent is guided from generic C to synthesis-ready hardware via microarchitectural directives, bit-accurate data types, hardware-aligned memory interfaces, and LLM-assisted feedback loops to resolve synthesis and timing issues.
Event Type
Tutorial
TimeSunday, July 261:30pm - 5:00pm PDT
LocationMtg Room 202AB