AI has made the lives of chip designers harder, not easier

I made this startling conclusion after attending the Design Automation Conference, the heart of design automation for chips, and synthesizing my findings.

There, I noticed that most experienced silicon engineers do not completely trust AI to design chips quite yet.

On the design side, AI does offer some productivity and quality of life benefits for chip designers, such as vibe coding RTL.

However, quite paradoxically, silicon for AI applications requires increasingly complex architectures and compute requirements. These introduces several challenges chip designers have to deal with, including:

- More complex verification, which has historically been the most labor-intensive step in chip design

- Multiphysics challenges with off-chip thermal/SI/PI/packaging  

- Late-stage firefighting in power closure due to bursty, unpredictable LLM workloads in systolic arrays

What are your thoughts? Have you seen AI improve the chip design flow, or is it simply another frustrating flow to pick up?