{"slug": "claude-for-hardware", "title": "Claude-for-Hardware", "summary": "Midstall released Claude-for-Hardware, a plugin of 15 Claude Code skills for hardware design, validation, and bring-up, covering tasks from HDL module design and SoC integration to FPGA bring-up, tapeout precheck, and Nix-based EDA packaging. The plugin includes agents, commands, hooks, and evals, and is available via the Claude Code plugin marketplace. Midstall's house style emphasizes failing fast, fixing root causes, reading datasheets, and writing in ASD-STE100 Simplified Technical English.", "body_md": "Claude Code skills for hardware design, validation, and bring-up.\n\nA plugin of focused skills that teach Claude how to do real hardware work: designing reusable HDL, integrating an SoC, bringing up FPGAs and bare-metal targets, building firmware boot chains, verifying designs against golden models, validating codegen on real silicon, prepping a tapeout, and packaging EDA tools in Nix. Each skill is domain-general but carries Midstall's house style: failures should fail, fix the root cause, read the datasheet, test like it's going to silicon, and write in ASD-STE100 Simplified Technical English.\n\n| Skill | Use when |\n|---|---|\n`hdl-module-design` |\nWriting or refactoring an HDL module and you need it parameterized, validated, and testable |\n`reference-driven-rohd` |\nImplementing a block/protocol/peripheral in ROHD and you should fetch the spec, references, and reusable libs first instead of writing from memory |\n`rohd-rtl-gotchas` |\nBuilding or testing RTL in ROHD/rohd_bridge/rohd_hcl and hitting hierarchy, sim-setup, or SV-emission errors |\n`soc-integration` |\nComposing an SoC from peripherals and a bus, or generating device trees / ACPI from one description |\n`rtl-area-timing` |\nOptimizing RTL microarchitecture for area or Fmax when a design won't fit or meet timing |\n`fpga-synthesis-fit` |\nSynthesizing with yosys/nextpnr, fighting area/congestion, measuring Fmax, or instantiating block RAM |\n`fpga-bringup` |\nLoading a bitstream onto a real FPGA and driving it over JTAG/GPIO |\n`bare-metal-bringup` |\nBringing up bare-metal or kernel code on a new arch/board that won't boot or hangs |\n`firmware-boot-chain` |\nBuilding or debugging a firmware/boot chain (SBI/UEFI/ACPI/bootloader) or measured boot |\n`differential-verification` |\nVerifying a DUT against a golden reference model with coverage-guided fuzzing |\n`codegen-validation` |\nProving a compiler backend's output by executing it on a real CPU or fast emulator |\n`tapeout-precheck` |\nPrepping a design for tapeout: DRC/LVS signoff, submission packaging |\n`nix-eda-packaging` |\nPackaging EDA toolchains in Nix without dlopen/wrapper hacks |\n`silicon-grade-discipline` |\nAny silicon-bound code facing a fast-vs-correct tradeoff (the shared backbone) |\n\nThe plugin ships more than the skill files.\n\n**Agents** (`agents/`\n\n) bundle the relevant skills into a focused reviewer you can\ndispatch at the right moment:\n\n`rtl-reviewer`\n\nreviews an HDL diff against the design and discipline red flags.`tapeout-signoff`\n\nruns the precheck gate and refuses to wave real violations.`bringup-debugger`\n\ndrives the bring-up checkpoint ladder when hardware is dead.\n\n**Commands** (`commands/`\n\n) are guided entry points that drive a workflow:\n\n`/fpga-fit`\n\nruns the measure-don't-guess synthesis and timing loop.`/tapeout-check`\n\nwalks the tapeout signoff gate.`/hw-bringup`\n\ndrives the bring-up ladder for a stuck board.\n\n**Hooks** (`hooks/`\n\n) enforce the house style mechanically: a write-time check\nrejects em dashes, emoji, and malformed `SKILL.md`\n\nfrontmatter, so the rules are\nautomated rather than repeated in prose. The same logic runs in CI via\n`scripts/lint-skills.sh`\n\n.\n\n**Evals** (`evals/`\n\n) are the benchmarks that prove the skills earn their keep:\nusefulness (do they beat the unaided model), discovery (do they fire at the right\ntime), and adversarial discovery (do they resist bait and stay quiet on vague\nprompts). See [evals/README.md](/Midstall/claude-for-hardware/blob/master/evals/README.md). These skills are measured, not\nasserted.\n\nAdd the marketplace and install the plugin:\n\n```\n/plugin marketplace add Midstall/claude-for-hardware\n/plugin install claude-for-hardware\n```\n\nSkills activate automatically when their trigger conditions match. You can also invoke one directly by name.", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/claude-for-hardware", "canonical_source": "https://github.com/Midstall/claude-for-hardware", "published_at": "2026-08-02 05:40:32+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-08-02 05:52:21.253263+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["ai-tools", "developer-tools", "ai-agents"], "entities": ["Midstall", "Claude Code", "Claude-for-Hardware", "ROHD", "yosys", "nextpnr", "Nix"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/claude-for-hardware", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/claude-for-hardware.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/claude-for-hardware.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/claude-for-hardware.jsonld"}}