Meta’s Muse AI Agent Designs Crypto-Specific RISC-V SoC for $2,000

A semiconductor expert has demonstrated just how far AI agents have come in chip design — completing the layout of a crypto-specific system-on-chip on the RISC-V architecture using only Meta’s Muse AI agent, at a claimed cost of around $2,000.

From Prompt to Silicon Blueprint

The expert, known as @bubbleboi and a mascot for the Thru blockchain project, detailed the achievement in a widely shared post on October 13. The Muse AI agent completed the full place-and-route work — arranging logic gates and drawing the metal wires that connect them — in OpenROAD, and generated the final GDS (GDSII) blueprint file that would typically be sent to a fabrication plant to manufacture the silicon.

The chip supports the cryptographic algorithms underpinning almost every blockchain — SHA-256/512, Keccak, Ed25519, and secp256k1 — for hashing and signature verification.

The Specs

The design packs around 61,590 logic cells, runs at 100 million cycles per second with roughly 4.5 nanoseconds of timing slack, and consumes just 20 milliwatts of power. It closed on the nangate45 process node — modest by industry standards, but proof that AI agents can now navigate a professional chip-design toolchain end to end.

Chip design is notoriously laborious, demanding specialized EDA tools and months of engineering effort. Compressing the pipeline to hours or days — at hobbyist cost — could open hardware design to a vastly wider set of developers.

Why Crypto Cares

The Thru blockchain project frames the chip as part of its push to become “the fastest blockchain on earth.” More broadly, the episode is a case study in the convergence the AI × crypto sector keeps promising: AI agents doing the engineering, blockchains providing the trust layer. Whether this particular chip ever gets fabricated, the workflow it demonstrates — natural-language instructions producing a manufacturable design — may matter more than the silicon itself.

Source: Wccftech