TechnologyVerification is the moatvc-gatesNEXT ACTIONINCandidatefrom an agent01Formalvacuity-gated02DRCtwo engines03LVSvs the schematic04PhysicalSPICE · EM · thermalCLEARproved · no gap leftNEEDS GUARDSa known gap, statedBASELINE FAILEDthe check itself failedLEGENDpassesfailed, with the next actionEvery gate returns one of three answers; the middle — a stated gap — keeps a design honest, and a failure hands back the next action.~23bn tokensinternal data NVIDIA used to adapt a model for its own engineersChipNeMo, arXiv 2023~1.5%of the compute of training the generalist modelChipNeMo, arXiv 202320 blockswhat AlphaChip was pretrained on — three TPU generationsNature, 2021 · DeepMind~100Mlabelled examples one study puts on specialised RTL modelsChang et al., DAC 2024Design data is walled: PDKs are confidential, and public RTL is orders of magnitude short.We reward verification, not generation — simulation is the teacher, and it needs no corpus.Multi-gate signoff: vacuity-gated proofs, two DRC engines, provenance on every artifact.Lumicule