In plain words: A self-evolving agent treats hardware design like code updates in a repository: a written spec becomes built-in knowledge, a checker, and rules, and the agent edits an isolated copy alone. It finished every task in four hardware-design test sets with no human help.
Abstract
We present HORIZON, a self-evolving agent framework that treats hardware design as repository-level code evolution. A Markdown harness is compiled into a project pack containing domain knowledge, an executable evaluator, an acceptance predicate, and a git/runtime policy; a hands-free agent loop then evolves an isolated git worktree, using repository operations for state management, tracing, and replay. This extends prior works of repository-scale self-evolution from EDA software systems, to hardware-design artifacts themselves. We evaluate our approach on ChipBench, RTLLM, Verilog-Eval, and nine CVDP categories, achieving 100\% benchmark completion across all suites with a fully hands-free agentic loop. However, we do not claim that agentic AI for hardware design is solved: these benchmarks are controlled proxies for a much broader engineering problem in chip design. Section~\ref{sec:discuss} examines the limitations of the current study and highlights open research challenges.
Cunxi Yu, Chenhui Deng, Nathaniel Pinckney, Brucek Khailany
arXiv:2606.28279 · cs.AR, cs.AI · submitted Jun 26, 2026
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