Engineering notes

• 2026-05-28 · 14 min

  How the v10 MJPEG-class codec closed at 39.85 dB

  Twelve agent-authored RTL blocks, three LLM bit-precision bugs that lint-passed and block-sim-passed, sky130 lpflow_* dont_use cells, a 13,921-terminal high-fanout net, and a chip that beat its own software golden by 1.15 dB. End-to-end run on OCI A1.Flex.

• 2026-05-11 · 12 min

  Two local LLMs drive Coresmith end-to-end

  Gemma 4 31B ships fast and wrong on a JPEG-class codec block; Qwen 3.6 27B writes a 466-line spec and gets killed by a 20-minute timeout. PSNR-22.6 dB image roundtrip through Verilator-simulated RTL.