Chipmind Unveils RTL Canvas for AI Chip Design

ZURICH, SWITZERLAND, Chipmind, a leader in AI-driven semiconductor design automation, has launched RTL Canvas. This new platform acts as the industry's first bidirectional contract surface between chip design engineers and AI agents, aiming to streamline a critical bottleneck in hardware development.

StartupHub data

Companies working on this

Profiles of the companies named in this story, with funding and a one-liner from our database.

ChipMind

$25M

AI-powered platform for optimizing chip design and verification.

The Register Transfer Layer (RTL) Canvas allows engineers to sketch architectural intent directly onto a circuit diagram. Crucially, every AI-generated change renders back as an interactive visual of the modified structure, complete with implications and unverified elements.

Solving the AI Code-Review Bottleneck

AI agents have significantly accelerated hardware code (RTL) generation, outpacing human review capabilities. However, human judgment remains essential for architectural intent, unspecified assumptions, and critical corner cases.

Traditional text-heavy pull requests and static diagrams have become a major bottleneck. This forces engineers to review massive, complex changes inefficiently, delaying daily tasks and shifting the primary challenge from code generation to human understanding and trust.

"Engineers don't think in code. They think in blocks and buses," stated Harald Kröll, CEO and Co-Founder of Chipmind. "We built a canvas where you draw intended changes directly onto your existing chip design, and the AI writes the RTL. When the AI writes, its changes return as a visual diff, not a wall of text."

Interactive RTL Canvas: A Generative UI

Chipmind's Generative UI fundamentally shifts the human-AI interaction from text chat to direct graphical manipulation. It synthesizes a custom visual control interface on-the-fly, tailored to the immediate engineering context.

The RTL Canvas includes a real-time visual staging sandbox. Engineers can prototype, plan, and simulate design variations without altering the underlying codebase, allowing for architectural exploration while keeping the design repository untouched. The canvas itself becomes the contract, ensuring only understood and agreed-upon changes are merged.

Rather than static images, the canvas dynamically generates optimal visual formats, displaying relevant architecture, finite-state-machine, or waveform diagrams. The platform integrates within customer design environments, building a customer-owned Visual-Intent Dataset that encodes unique team methodologies.

Core Capabilities

• Adding and Removing Modules: Engineers graphically modify components, drag modules across hierarchies, re-route peripherals, and experiment with optimizations directly on the live canvas. These changes are captured in a secure staging sandbox for iterative exploration and validation before any code is altered.
• Interactive Visual Diffs: The platform translates textual code changes into interactive structural components. New FSM stages, clock domains, and logic gates are highlighted in green; removed elements in red; and unchanged code is "ghosted" to reduce visual noise.
• Logic-Aware Staging Sandboxes: Engineers can interactively drag signals, re-route buses, and experiment with optimizations on a live canvas. This low-latency sandbox allows visual constraint validation before AI agents execute code changes.
• On-the-Fly Hierarchical Traversal: Fluid, interactive zooming simplifies navigating complex designs. Focusing on sub-hierarchies dynamically generates higher-resolution functional layouts, state transitions, and address maps in real-time.

Chipmind Agents with the RTL Canvas platform aim to cut onboarding times for legacy chip IP, automate design exploration, and eliminate text-based pull-request backlogs. This enables faster, safer transitions from specification to validated silicon architecture with reduced cognitive fatigue.

"The core technical breakthrough here is giving our AI agents the power to dynamically shape the user experience while adhering to hardware reality," added Dr. Sandro Belfanti, CTO and Co-Founder of Chipmind. "This ensures the AI never hallucinates faulty logic, yet remains flexible enough to sketch unwritten architectures. We are moving chip design past parsing raw text into a fluid, intuitive environment."

Chipmind Agents with RTL Canvas are available for enterprise evaluation. Semiconductor teams can apply for an early-access pilot or schedule a technical demonstration by contacting [email protected].