Engineer Uses Two AI Agents and 1 Billion Tokens to Design a Real Silicon Chip

A developer known as C Dragon completed two month-long projects using a two-AI, one-human team to design a SHA-256 cryptographic accelerator chip and integrate it into an open-source SoC. The workflow paired a planning AI (DeepSeek) with an executing AI (GLM) to separate design decisions from tool execution, reducing self-validation bias. The chip was built on SkyWater's 130nm open-source process and passed all 10 industrial signoff checks, including a transistor-level LVS match of 8,352 devices and zero DRC violations. Approximately one billion tokens were consumed across both projects, highlighting the significant computational cost of genuine AI-assisted hardware design. The author concludes that while AI proved capable of flow orchestration and error handling, the exercise also exposed clear boundaries to its reliability without structured human oversight.