CLOSER-Bench: A Benchmark for Budgeted Cross-Stage Hardware Design Closure by AI Agents
CLOSER-Bench is a new benchmark designed to evaluate AI agents on the complex task of hardware design closure across multiple stages, including RTL, synthesis, and physical design. The benchmark introduces a controlled protocol that measures agent performance on tasks spanning from specification to GDS, capturing both final quality and intermediate progress. Initial experiments reveal a significant gap between task completion and achieving full design closure, highlighting the limitations of current approaches and motivating the need for sequential decision-making strategies.
Why it matters: CLOSER-Bench provides a unified and rigorous framework for assessing AI agents on long-horizon, multi-stage hardware engineering tasks, addressing a key challenge in automating hardware design workflows.
Full story at: arXiv Software Engineering ↗