Between Spark and Silicon

Zihao Wang

Generative agents make it easy to imagine hardware design as a conversation followed by compilation. Yet faster register-transfer-level (RTL) generation does not ensure a faster, defensible engineering decision. This perspective argues that the operative unit of hardware agility is an accepted change supported by current, scoped, and independently governed evidence. We revisit key developments in executable verification, design generators, integrated implementation, and agentic design automation, distinguishing historical capabilities from vendor claims and recent benchmark results.