CHIA: An open-source framework for principled, agentic AI-driven hardware/software co-design research
2026-06-25 • Hardware Architecture
Hardware Architecture
AI summaryⓘ
The authors introduced CHIA, an open-source framework designed to help researchers use AI to improve the design of computer hardware and software together. CHIA organizes the design process as loops of tasks involving different tools and AI models, making it easier to test and run complex workflows at large scales. It includes many popular design and simulation tools and supports reliable operation across various computer systems. To demonstrate its usefulness, the authors show several example projects, such as using AI to align hardware simulations and automatically fix programming issues. Overall, the paper presents CHIA as a platform to systematically explore AI-driven hardware/software co-design.
Agentic AIHardware/software co-designSystem-on-chipRTL (Register-transfer level)Microarchitectural simulationEvolutionary codingChipyardgem5FPGAAI model integration
Authors
Angela Cui, Ferran Hermida-Rivera, Jack Toubes, Raghav Gupta, Jim Fang, Chengyi Lux Zhang, Ella Schwarz, Junha Kim, Yakun Sophia Shao, Borivoje Nikolic, Christopher W. Fletcher, Sagar Karandikar
Abstract
Agentic artificial intelligence shows great promise for radically improving the pace of innovation in hardware/software co-design research across computer architecture, systems, compilers, and VLSI. Thus far, however, applications of AI in these contexts have generally been demonstrated in isolated settings on small-scale problems, due to the difficulty of designing and deploying complex AI-infused hardware and software development workflows. This paper introduces CHIA, an open-source hardware/software co-design framework for agile and principled research on the application of AI to co-design. CHIA treats the productive construction and scalable deployment of the co-design flow itself as a first-class objective. In CHIA, agentic AI-driven hardware and software design flows are expressed as \textit{CHIA loops}: directed cyclic graphs whose nodes execute various system-on-chip design tools, microarchitectural simulators, software build systems, AI models, evolutionary coding agents, and more. The \textit{CHIA library} provides node implementations for many popular tools, including Chipyard, gem5, ChampSim, FireSim, Hammer (thus several commercial ASIC CAD tools), Vivado, AlphaEvolve, AdaEvolve, and many others. CHIA also provides a broad set of features to conduct principled science around these flows. These include isolation between AI models and hardware tools, profiling mechanisms, fault-tolerant execution, and reliability at scale across hundreds of heterogeneous systems (CPUs, FPGAs, GPUs, etc., across public cloud/on-prem.). To showcase CHIA, we present five CHIA loops as case studies: (1) automatic RTL-to-gem5 simulator alignment, (2) LLM-driven implementation of microarchitectural features in RTL, (3) agentic, IPC-aware critical path optimization, (4) evolutionary architectural discovery, and (5) maintainer-friendly agentic GitHub issue fixing.