RTL Buddy

Open-source tooling for SystemVerilog/Verilog design and verification —
built to work well for both humans and AI agents.

RTL Buddy is an ecosystem of tools centered on rtl_buddy, a Python CLI that gives RTL projects a single, repeatable control plane for everyday design and verification work. It sits on top of the open-source tools your project already uses — Verilator, Yosys, OpenROAD, SymbiYosys, Surfer, Verible — giving you a cleaner interface, structured machine-readable output for CI and coding agents, and rich formatted output for people.

• rtl_buddy — the flagship CLI (PyPI · docs)
• rtl-buddy-project-template — a ready-to-run RTL project with example designs, tests, and full integration; the fastest way to try it

uv add rtl_buddy
uv run rb test basic        # run a single test
uv run rb regression        # run the full regression
uv run rb cdc -c cdc/sandbox/cdc.yaml

Simulation & Regression rb test · rb regression	Waveform Debug rb wave · rb hub	Synth · PnR · Power rb synth · rb pnr · rb power
CDC Lint rb cdc	Formal Verification rb fpv	Mutation Testing rb mut
AXI Profiling rb axi-profile	Spec Traceability rb spec	FPGA Implementation rb fpga
Design-Space Exploration rb xplr	CI & Agent Mode JSONL logs · rb tool-check

RTL Buddy is an experiment in agent-built EDA tooling — built by agents, for agents, with humans in the loop. The code, tests, and tooling across these repos are written largely by AI coding agents under human supervision, and the tools are designed first to be driven by agents: structured YAML config, machine-readable JSONL output, and explicit tool-readiness checks so an agent can plan, run, and interpret a full RTL flow on its own.

We're betting on speed. Letting agents do the building lets us move at a pace a hand-written toolchain of this scope simply can't — spanning simulation, synthesis, PnR, power, CDC, formal, mutation, profiling, and more, and growing fast.

We're equally blunt about the catch: agent-written code moves fast and breaks things. Gaps, rough edges, and the occasional wrong turn come with the territory. Our bet is that we can close them just as fast as we make them — with agents, backed by human review, regression suites, and the project template as a constant end-to-end check.

So treat this as living, breaking, fast-moving software. Pin your versions, expect things to change under you, and open issues when something cracks — that loop, agents fixing what agents built, is the project.

RTL Buddy maintains lightly-patched forks of several open-source EDA tools so its flows stay reproducible across platforms. Upstream is always the canonical source — these exist only to pin known-good builds and carry integration fixes.

yosys · yosys-slang · surfer · verilator · PeakRDL · coverview

Full docs live at rtl-buddy.github.io/rtl_buddy.

RTL Buddy's first-party tools are released under the BSD-3-Clause license. Forked upstream projects retain their original licenses.