Chip design does not often tend to be thought of as programming, although a complex system-on-chip (SoC) is generally crafted through thousands or millions of lines of code.

For decades chip design has primarily taken place in C-derived, domain-specific hardware description languages, such as Verilog and VHDL. A recent set of hardware description libraries, several based in Python, aim to instead move the chip-design process into modern programming languages.

These developments ride alongside a complementary rise in prominence of the open-source RISC-V instruction set, enabling Python implementations of fully open-source CPUs and SOCs.

This talk will introduce the primary libraries in this space, chips being built with them, and likely future directions for Python's role in silicon design.