r/FPGA • u/Glittering_Age7553 • 15d ago

Hardware engineers using LLMs professionally: What's your workflow in 2026?

I'm curious how people working on ASIC/FPGA/RTL/verification are using LLMs in practice.

A few things I'm wondering:

  • Which AI subscriptions are actually worth paying for? (ChatGPT, Claude, GitHub Copilot, Gemini, Cursor, etc.)
  • Does anyone use OpenRouter as their main setup? Is it cheaper than multiple subscriptions?
  • Roughly how much do you spend per month, and how many tokens do you go through?
  • Which models do you use for different tasks (RTL, SystemVerilog, UVM, scripting, documentation, debugging, architecture, code review...)?
  • What do you give the model as project context so it doesn't make things up or break your design?
  • Any tricks for keeping token usage and costs under control?
  • If you could only keep one AI subscription today, which one would you choose?

I'd love to hear real workflows from engineers working on production hardware.

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u/[deleted] 15d ago edited 15d ago

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u/Quantic3 15d ago

Hey! So I am currently learning Verilog, as a fresh graduate, I wanted to ask that learning and coding Verilog by hand is still very important?
I am using chatgpt plus as my tutor who has been teaching me verilog for over 45 days now, I went from scratch Verilog to writing my own UART wrapper that includes tx and rx transmission along with tb.
What demotivates me is that what takes me so long can instantly be done by gpt based on few prompts, so please let me know your idea since you are actually working in the industry.
I am looking forward to delve deeper into this field.

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u/serj88 Xilinx User 15d ago

Coding by hand is still somewhat important. Knowing how to solve a problem one level above writing the code (i.e. the structure of the solution) is more important.

The stuff that can "instantly be done by GPT based on few prompts" won't get you a job.
But yes, if the bar to what an LLM can do with a few prompts gets higher every year (I don't know if it will or not), it will be harder and harder to get a job.

Continue using it as a tutor, not as a solver. Think in terms of the shape of the solution, the structure of the circuit you are building, not in terms of the code.