AI Coding Is Old News; Now AI Designs Chips: Novasilicon's Architectural Bet

Chip manufacturing has seen almost no fundamental changes in the past twenty years. Front-end involves writing RTL, back-end handles synthesis and place-and-route, and verification runs simulations—every step relies on senior engineers trial-and-erroring based on experience. I once saw a similar dilemma in ByteDance's recommendation system team: as models grew larger and features multiplied, the ROI of manual parameter tuning plummeted. That’s when we started using AutoML and hyperparameter search, with immediate results. Chip design teams are now facing almost the same problem—just an order of magnitude more complex.