CHIA: An open-source framework for principled, agentic AI-driven hardware/software co-design research

Abstract: Agentic artificial intelligence shows great promise for radically improving the pace of innovation in hardware/software co-design research across computer architecture, systems, compilers, and VLSI. Thus far, however, applications of AI in these contexts have generally been demonstrated in isolated settings on small-scale problems, due to the difficulty of designing and deploying complex AI-infused hardware and software development workflows. This paper introduces CHIA, an open-source hardware/software co-design framework for agile and principled research on the application of AI to co-design. CHIA treats the productive construction and scalable deployment of the co-design flow itself as a first-class objective. In CHIA, agentic AI-driven hardware and software design flows are expressed as \textit{CHIA loops}: directed cyclic graphs whose nodes execute various system-on-chip design tools, microarchitectural simulators, software build systems, AI models, evolutionary coding agents, and more. The \textit{CHIA library} provides node implementations for many popular tools, including Chipyard, gem5, ChampSim, FireSim, Hammer (thus several commercial ASIC CAD tools), Vivado, AlphaEvolve, AdaEvolve, and many others. CHIA also provides a broad set of features to conduct principled science around these flows. These include isolation between AI models and hardware tools, profiling mechanisms, fault-tolerant execution, and reliability at scale across hundreds of heterogeneous systems (CPUs, FPGAs, GPUs, etc., across public cloud/on-prem.). To showcase CHIA, we present five CHIA loops as case studies: (1) automatic RTL-to-gem5 simulator alignment, (2) LLM-driven implementation of microarchitectural features in RTL, (3) agentic, IPC-aware critical path optimization, (4) evolutionary architectural discovery, and (5) maintainer-friendly agentic GitHub issue fixing.