Speaker: Christopher Fletcher
Location: Soda Hall, 510
Date: Friday, April 10th, 2026
Time: 12-1 pm PT
Title: Messages from across the event horizon: AI Agentic Design for Computer Architecture (and more generalizable learnings)
Abstract:
Agentic coding has just created a renaissance in software. But what about [digital] hardware?
In this talk, I will describe my experiences using Agentic coding to solve problems in Computer Architecture. That said: **No hardware/Architecture experience required.** I will try to make the takeaways and the learnings as generally applicable and useful as possible.
First, I will describe a self-imposed experiment to discover modern AI coding tools’ capabilities for hardware design (starting mid February 2026). Then I will describe principles and patterns I have been using to become more productive and tackle larger problems — based on my attempts to push the technology as hard as I can for the past 1.5 months.
I will keep the talk relatively short to leave plenty of time for discussion.
Speaker Bio: Christopher Fletcher is an Associate Professor of EECS at UC Berkeley. He is a computer architect whose research spans architecture, security, and domain-specific acceleration, especially at their intersections from cryptography and hardware attacks to algorithm-to-hardware co-design.