Jeyavijayan Rajendran

Weihua Xiao, Jason Blocklove, Matthew DeLorenzo et al. · stanford

GenAI Units In Digital Design Education (GUIDE) is an open courseware repository with runnable Google Colab labs and other materials. We describe the repository's architecture and educational approach based on standardized teaching units comprising slides, short videos, runnable labs, and related papers. This organization enables consistency for both the students' learning experience and the reuse and grading by instructors. We demonstrate GUIDE in practice with three representative units: VeriThoughts for reasoning and formal-verification-backed RTL generation, enhanced LLM-aided testbench generation, and LLMPirate for IP Piracy. We also provide details for four example course instances (GUIDE4ChipDesign, Build your ASIC, GUIDE4HardwareSecurity, and Hardware Design) that assemble GUIDE units into full semester offerings, learning outcomes, and capstone projects, all based on proven materials. For example, the GUIDE4HardwareSecurity course includes a project on LLM-aided hardware Trojan insertion that has been successfully deployed in the classroom and in Cybersecurity Games and Conference (CSAW), a student competition and academic conference for cybersecurity. We also organized an NYU Cognichip Hackathon, engaging students across 24 international teams in AI-assisted RTL design workflows. The GUIDE repository is open for contributions and available at: https://github.com/FCHXWH823/LLM4ChipDesign.

Mohamadreza Rostami, Nikhilesh Singh, Stephen Muttathil et al.

Hardware security competitions such as HackTheSilicon serve as benchmarking platforms for evaluating vulnerability detection methods and for training humans and AI. However, our study reveals that LLMs threaten their validity. Instead of genuine security reasoning, detectors exploit a diff-style syntactic comparison, achieving an 83% detection rate, undermining fair evaluation. To mitigate this, we propose the first LLM-oriented, semantics-preserving obfuscation framework for these benchmarks. Unlike IP-protection approaches, it applies human-readable transformations and controlled diff-noise while preserving functionality. On HackTheSilicon, the framework reduces LLM-based detection accuracy by 50% with only 10% obfuscation and by 78.6% under complete obfuscation, restoring benchmark reliability.