BugNeMo

Nvidia's AI Systems Design Chip Circuits, Verify Designs, and Test New Layouts

Nvidia chief scientist Bill Dally described the company's use of AI across five stages of chip design at GTC 2025, including NVCell (a RL+genetic algorithm system that redesigns ~2,500-3,000 layout cells overnight vs. 10 engineer-months), PrefixRL (RL-designed arithmetic circuits 20-30% better than human designs), and ChipNeMo/BugNeMo (LLaMA 2-based LLMs fine-tuned on internal GPU documentation). The systems demonstrate measurable improvements over human and industry-standard designs, though Dally acknowledged that fully autonomous GPU design from a prompt remains a distant goal. The piece also references a 2025 Verkoran paper describing an agentic system that autonomously designed a RISC-V CPU from a 219-word specification.