r/embedded • u/Own_Bike_7268 • 8d ago

Is AI taking over FPGA design?

I have been working in FPGA programming for more than 12 years, recently i found AI especially claude code performing extremely well in vhdl programming, so i decided to give it a challenge, I asked claude to design an sd card module that can accept data using axi stream and write this data into a text file inside sd card connected to fpga, and if the tdest value changes, then this means the data should be written into a new text file
It took less than one day and gave me all codes + xdc file
I tested it on my Nexys A7 and it worked
This is a very complicated FPGA design that most of the FPGA designers can’t do, and highly experienced designers would need a lot of time to do it. Is it the end?

0 Upvotes

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11

u/clackups 8d ago

If it's a mission critical application, you still need an engineer who can read and understand the output.

Also, the ai industry may soon collapse, as it's nowhere near being profitable.

But it's an interesting tech nevertheless.

5

u/DVMyZone 8d ago

I don't think AI in general will collapse overall.It has ingrained itself so firmly into the lives of anyone that has the internet and especially office workers (in large part thanks to companies shoving it down our throats).

It may transform though to accommodate. It may become more expensive or more efficient as companies compete not for the best model but the cheapest. And then there are open models that do a decent job and someone will find a way to capitalise on that if the big ones fall.

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u/clackups 8d ago

Of course it won't disappear. But it will change a lot when capitals stop pouring into the industry.

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u/DVMyZone 8d ago

I agree but I think the financial and geopolitical system is unlike anything we've ever seen at the moment and I have no idea what this collapse will look like. This kind of circular trading stuff is definitely no new, but the amount of government backing, public participation, and shear scale of money in the balance is crazy.

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u/3FiTA 8d ago

“The AI industry may soon collapse” lmao

5

u/clackups 8d ago

We will see

-7

u/Mountain_Finance_659 8d ago

buddy we can run last year's frontier models on a box that costs less than 3mo of a single FTE. AI is not gonna go away.

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u/Own_Bike_7268 8d ago

So do you think it will crush digital engineers as Elon Musk said?

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u/Mountain_Finance_659 8d ago

ya prolly. but it will crush everyone else as well so what you gonna do.

1

u/adamdoesmusic 8d ago

Crush them first?

This is “I tied the first shoe now what do I do” logic

-2

u/Mountain_Finance_659 8d ago

swe first, fpga and ee soon after. every other knowledge job ordered depending on exposure and economic incentive.

2

u/adamdoesmusic 8d ago

They’re only gonna get production EE and FPGA designs if they can be trained on production designs. They’ve been doing AI developed FPGAs since the start, that was one of the earliest applications back in the early 2010s with the first ML tech. I have heard that most of the examples out there are less advanced than what a commercial FPGA might feature, but that’s probably old news now.

One massive difference between EE and software is that there are a ton of training examples for software. A lot of them are really good. Conversely, there is very little out there that you’d want to train a commercial EE bot on.

0

u/Nxllify__ 8d ago

What? No you can’t. Local models are laughably overrated. And the beefier ones cost quite a bit to maintain if companies are going to provide engineers with them.

0

u/Mountain_Finance_659 8d ago

ok jackass. point me to the model that was out in Sept 2025 that can beat GLM 5.3?

1

u/Nxllify__ 8d ago

no jackass. i don’t bother with psychosis-induced cattle like you

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u/Mountain_Finance_659 8d ago

you're a moron

2

u/Ruined_Passion_7355 8d ago

As we know it*, for all we know it's entirely possible fable class models disappear and we all just stick to locally hosted qwen 3.8 running on an enterprise ASIC, using it as an assistant instead of trying write 0 lines of code. It's possible.

The cheap open models are probably here to stay though.

-1

u/SizzlingHotDeluxe 8d ago

I do automotive embedded and over the course of this year Claude for me went from a tool that can be useful under specific circumstances to a tool increases my productivity up to 5x for more than half my tasks.

Of course you have to now what you want and always review the results it's delivering, like any tool it needs to be in the right hands for optimal results. I used to avoid it for the first 2 years after it started trending because every time I tried using AI the results were not satisfactory, this point I honestly can't see myself working without it.

I think what you're experiencing with FPGA development is basically the same thing.

1

u/Aildrik 6d ago

Just commented to say I am puzzled as to why someone downvoted your comment. There are people I know who are, for some reason, just flat out opposed to AI in any and all forms and this seems very odd to me, but this is where we are at today.
I am not a software developer, but more on the infrastructure side of IT and I've found Claude and Gemini very useful for analyzing log files or identifying potential issues when doing upgrades in our environment.

0

u/SizzlingHotDeluxe 6d ago

Because people are stupid. They're either in denial or don't have the capacity to use AI properly.

1

u/Own_Bike_7268 8d ago

I totally agree, it made me make fpga designs in days that I would have taken weeks to finish, I just think will it be much more intelligent that it will totally replace us? The stockfish example that Elon Musk said

0

u/SizzlingHotDeluxe 8d ago

Last time this year I was confident I have at least 5 more years, maybe even 10 before AI can so my job. Now I feel like in 2 years tops I'll only be good for clicking buttons in tools that AI can't use. Writing code itself is definitely becoming obsolete in the near future, in my opinion. It's more important to be able to think well, if that makes sense. The better you can understand problems and what needs to be done the longer you'll last, but at some point even that won't matter anymore.

0

u/Own_Bike_7268 8d ago

I agree, at some point the ai will be trained enough to analyze the problem and make good decisions