MaxKernel is a multi‑agent system designed to generate high‑performance custom kernels for TPUs. It offers three paradigms: a Human‑in‑the‑Loop agent for collaborative design, an Autonomous agent that runs a fully automated optimization loop, and a Graph‑Based Autonomous Search for global exploration. All paradigms share specialized sub‑agents for planning, implementation, debugging, testing, and profiling, and the system consistently matches expert hand‑tuned baselines on the JaxBench suite and real‑world workloads.
By Shangkun Wang, Nina Cai, Charles Hoong, Julian Walker, Gerson Kroiz, George Vanica, Deepak Patil, Andi Gavrilescu, Hassan Sipra, Sethu Sankaran
arXiv:2606. 28279v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We present HORIZON, a self-evolving agent framework that treats hardware design as repository-level code evolution.
By Cunxi Yu, Chenhui Deng, Nathaniel Pinckney, Brucek Khailany
arXiv:2607. 16632v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Hardware engineering exposes coding agents to a form of long-horizon work that is difficult to capture with pass-at-k: progress is continuous, tool feedback is delayed and heterogeneous, and a backend failure may require revising RTL rather than tuning another physical-design parameter.
By Peilong Zhou, Zhirong Chen, Cangyuan Li, Haoyu Gao, Kaiyan Chang, Ziming Qu, Ying Wang
Large Language Model agents are being explored for chip design, but most methods work directly at RTL. This study compares Direct RTL Design, Agent-based HLS Design, Post-Compiler HLS Refinement, and Post-HLS RTL Refinement, and proposes a combined workflow called Agent-based HLS with RTL Refinement (AHRR). Using FPGAs for evaluation, AHRR achieves a 2.6× geometric‑mean speedup over Direct RTL Design across an 11‑task benchmark suite, demonstrating that higher‑level abstractions and subsequent RTL refinement can improve chip design efficiency.
By Zijian Ding, Yang Zou, Yizhou Sun, Jason Cong
BuildBench introduces a realistic benchmark for evaluating large language model agents on the task of compiling open‑source software (OSS). It includes diverse OSS projects that lack clear build instructions, have undocumented dependencies, and may require source patching or script modification. The authors also present OSS‑BUILD‑AGENT, a baseline LLM‑based agent that retrieves build instructions effectively and achieves state‑of‑the‑art performance on the benchmark.
By Zehua Zhang, Ati Priya Bajaj, Divij Handa, Siyu Liu, Arvind S Raj, Hongkai Chen, Hulin Wang, Yibo Liu, Zion Leonahenahe Basque, Souradip Nath, Vishal Juneja, Nikhil Chapre, Tiffany Bao, Yan Shoshitaishvili, Adam Doup\'e, Chitta Baral, Ruoyu Wang
arXiv:2606. 09867v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Optimizing register transfer level (RTL) code is of vital importance in hardware design.
By Qi Xiong, Renzhi Chen, Bowei Wang, Yuqing Xiong, Libo Huang, Lei Wang