(Image credit: Chinese Academy of Sciences)

AI chip design startup Verkor.io claims, in a research paper published in March, that its agentic AI system, Design Conductor, autonomously produced a complete RISC-V CPU core — taking a 219-word requirements document and generating a verified, layout-ready design in 12 hours, which is orders of magnitude faster than the standard 18- to 36-month timelines seen in commercial chip design.

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(Image credit: Verkor.io)

VerCore hasn’t been physically fabricated and was instead verified in simulation using Spike, a reference RISC-V ISA simulator, and ASAP7 is an academic process design kit, not a production 7nm node.…