ICLAD GenAI Chip Hackathon @ DAC

What is GenAI Chip Hackathon?

GenAI Chip Hackathon is a chip design challenge contest co-located with DAC and sponsored by Qualcomm and the International Conference on LLM-Aided Design | Iclad. The contest requires participants to use Gen AI Models to solve a number of problems related to hardware design for integrated circuits. In this competition, participants can compete using Small Language Models (SLMs, with low compute requirements running on a laptop) as well as Large Language Models (LLMs, on the cloud) to solve problems in RTL design, verification, and physical design. The competition will have two tracks (1) SLM Challenge and (2) Open Challenge (any model). Separate awards will be given to the winners of each track.

The contest mimics real-world scenarios where hardware engineers must find bugs in a given design, which can range from RTL coding bugs to timing errors. A group of chip design companies is defining the problems to reflect actual real-world challenges faced in the IC design industry.

The winners of the hackathon will be honored in person at DAC 2025 and ICLAD 2025 award ceremonies.

Why GenAI Chip Hackathon?

The growing complexity of hardware design and physical implementation has led to very long design verification and design closure cycles in synthesis and physical design. System-on-chip (SoC) designers use a mix of EDA tools, human experience, and intuition to solve design problems. With each chip generation and technology node shrink, the human effort is increasing and consumes more and more engineering and compute resources as well as design time.

Language models, both SLMs and LLMs, promise to manage design complexity more efficiently than human designers and leverage the vast experience captured in pre—trained models to solve problems with much fewer resources.

This hackathon will create an environment for participants to innovatively use SLMs and LLMs to solve several chip design problems quickly.

Who Can Participate?

Participating teams can be from industry, academia, or a combination. They will receive a problem set with associated data, and infrastructure needed to solve the problem with language models.

Timeline

• March 31st, 2025: Registration Starts
• June 22, 2025: On-site competition at DAC

Learn more and register here: GenAI Chip Hackathon