[2603.25719] Agent Factories for High Level Synthesis: How Far Can General-Purpose Coding Agents Go in Hardware Optimization?

Computer Science > Artificial Intelligence arXiv:2603.25719 (cs) [Submitted on 26 Mar 2026] Title:Agent Factories for High Level Synthesis: How Far Can General-Purpose Coding Agents Go in Hardware Optimization? Authors:Abhishek Bhandwaldar, Mihir Choudhury, Ruchir Puri, Akash Srivastava View a PDF of the paper titled Agent Factories for High Level Synthesis: How Far Can General-Purpose Coding Agents Go in Hardware Optimization?, by Abhishek Bhandwaldar and Mihir Choudhury and Ruchir Puri and Akash Srivastava View PDF HTML (experimental) Abstract:We present an empirical study of how far general-purpose coding agents -- without hardware-specific training -- can optimize hardware designs from high-level algorithmic specifications. We introduce an agent factory, a two-stage pipeline that constructs and coordinates multiple autonomous optimization agents. In Stage~1, the pipeline decomposes a design into sub-kernels, independently optimizes each using pragma and code-level transformations, and formulates an Integer Linear Program (ILP) to assemble globally promising configurations under an area constraint. In Stage~2, it launches $N$ expert agents over the top ILP solutions, each exploring cross-function optimizations such as pragma recombination, loop fusion, and memory restructuring that are not captured by sub-kernel decomposition. We evaluate the approach on 12 kernels from HLS-Eval and Rodinia-HLS using Claude Code (Opus~4.5/4.6) with AMD Vitis HLS. Scaling from 1 to 10 ag...