Deterministic Hardware with Stochastic Authors: Where AI Belongs in Your Test Workflow

Reconfigurable hardware lets engineers adapt instrumentation to each test. Large language models make this more accessible by generating FPGA functionality without specialist expertise. But their output is nondeterministic: identical prompts can produce different results, and careful prompting cannot prove correctness. In measurement, reproducibility and methodological transparency are essential. A verification-first workflow therefore validates every AI-generated instrument against test benches before measurement, recording the evidence for its approval. Nondeterminism remains in the authoring stage; once validated and running on the FPGA, execution is deterministic and low-latency.