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The article discusses the challenges associated with Verilog, a hardware description language, and its potential to introduce bugs in hardware design. It draws parallels between Verilog and memory-unsafe programming languages like C and C++, emphasizing the need for better hardware description languages (HDLs). The author advocates for a deeper understanding of Verilog's flaws to prevent future hardware issues as custom hardware design becomes more prevalent.
- ▪Verilog is widely used in hardware design but is often criticized for being frustrating and error-prone.
- ▪The article compares the risks associated with Verilog to those of memory-unsafe programming languages, suggesting that similar issues could arise in hardware.
- ▪The author calls for investment in understanding Verilog's problems to develop better HDLs that can reduce the frequency of hardware bugs.
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Story provenance
Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | Cornell |
| Canonical URL | https://www.cs.cornell.edu/~asampson/blog/buildingblocks.html |
| Publication time | Tue, 26 May 2026 21:39:58 -0500 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-05-27T03:07:56.299Z |
| Last seen | 2026-05-27T03:07:56.299Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | None |
| Cluster logic | Not yet clustered, or no peer story found in the clustering window. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
This post is based on a keynote I gave at Dagstuhl Seminar #26042, Trustworthy System Architectures for the Age of Custom Silicon. Many thanks to the seminar's organizers and to the Dagstuhl staff for a fun and enlightening workshop. If there are hardware engineers who love Verilog, I haven’t met them. Almost universally, the attitude toward Verilog seems to be that it’s frustrating, ridiculous, error-prone, and the only pragmatic choice. Verilog is inescapable because it is the input format to essentially every EDA tool. Its centrality means that it is a de facto intermediate representation implementing for every other HDL: even if you prefer Bluespec, Chisel, Amaranth, or Spade, they all have to compile to Verilog to interact with the rest of the hardware world.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Cornell.
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