Since entering the scene in a big way, the possibilities of ChatGPT seem endless, something a team of researchers with the New York State University put to the test recently when they successfully designed a semiconductor chip using no hardware definition language.
The team showed what AI is capable of when they designed, manufactured and benchmarked a fully working chip using only plain English.
The chip in question isn’t a full processor like the ones we’re used to seeing from Intel. Instead, it’s an element of a whole CPU, the logic for creating a novel 8-bit accumulator-based microprocessor architecture.
For those who don’t know, Accumulators are essentially registered where the results of intermediate calculations are stored and are integral to how CPUs work.
In typical situations, teams would work on several stages to design a chip like this. One of the most time-consuming tasks is translating the plain English plan into a Hardware Descriptor Language.
In a quote from the team, they said:
“The big challenge with hardware description languages is that not many people know how to write them. It’s quite hard to become an expert in them. That means we still have our best engineers doing menial things in these languages because there are just not that many engineers to do them.”
Using ChatGPT, the research team could skip the Hardware Descriptor Language stage altogether. The team also encountered far fewer human-induced errors in the translation process, resulting in a far quicker design time and allowing for more creativity.
“This study resulted in what we believe is the first fully AI-generated HDL sent for fabrication into a physical chip. Some AI models, like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Bard, can generate software code in different programming languages, but their application in hardware design has not been extensively studied yet. This research shows AI can benefit hardware fabrication too, especially when it’s used conversationally, where you can have a kind of back-and-forth to perfect the designs.” – Dr. Hammond Pearce, a member of the New York State University reacher team.
What you think about the rise of AI like ChatGPT? Let me know in the comments.