GenAI Units In Digital Design Education (GUIDE) is an open courseware repository with runnable Google Colab labs and other materials. We describe the repository's architecture and educational approach based on standardized teaching units comprising slides, short videos, runnable labs, and related papers. This organization enables consistency for both the students' learning experience and the reuse and grading by instructors. We demonstrate GUIDE in practice with three representative units: VeriThoughts for reasoning and formal-verification-backed RTL generation, enhanced LLM-aided testbench generation, and LLMPirate for IP Piracy. We also provide details for four example course instances (GUIDE4ChipDesign, Build your ASIC, GUIDE4HardwareSecurity, and Hardware Design) that assemble GUIDE units into full semester offerings, learning outcomes, and capstone projects, all based on proven materials. For example, the GUIDE4HardwareSecurity course includes a project on LLM-aided hardware Trojan insertion that has been successfully deployed in the classroom and in Cybersecurity Games and Conference (CSAW), a student competition and academic conference for cybersecurity. We also organized an NYU Cognichip Hackathon, engaging students across 24 international teams in AI-assisted RTL design workflows. The GUIDE repository is open for contributions and available at: https://github.com/FCHXWH823/LLM4ChipDesign.
Figures & tables
Fig. 1: Educational approach for generative AI in chip design using the open-source GUIDE framework. Figure was generated using NotebookLM.
Topic
Subtopic
Unit
Description
LLM-aided RTL Generation
RTL Generation from NL
AutoChip [ 6 ]
Generate Verilog from a prompt and testbench plus iterative compilation/ simulation feedback.
ROME [ 7 ]
Uses hierarchical prompting to decompose complex designs so smaller open-source LLMs can generate larger Verilog systems with better quality and lower cost.
Veritas [ 8 ]
Has an LLM generate CNF clauses as a formal functional specification and deterministically converts CNF to Verilog for correctness by construction.
PrefixLLM [ 9 ]
Represents prefix-adder synthesis as structured text (SPCR) and performs iterative LLM-guided design space exploration to optimize area and delay.
VeriDispatcher [ 10 ]
Dispatch RTL tasks to LLMs using pre-inference difficulty prediction to improve quality and reduce LLM use cost.
Finetuned LLMs for RTL Generation
VGen [ 11 ]
Proposes a dedicated dataset and demonstrates that finetuning LLMs on this dataset significantly improves their Verilog code generation capabilities.
TABLE I: GUIDE taxonomy in our current repository: topics, subtopics, and representative units and descriptions.
Week
Theme
Typical Activities
1
Course setup
Course overview; GenAI for digital design; environment setup; first RTL-generation warm-up lab.
As generative AI (GenAI) tools become easily accessible, there is promise in using such tools to support instructors. To that end, this paper examines using GenAI to help generate slides from instructor authored course notes, emphasizing instructor and student perceptions. We examine an end-to-end education tool (NotebookLM), two general-purpose LLMs (Claude, M365 Copilot), and two coding assistants (Cursor, Claude Code). We first analyze whether GenAI generated slides are good'' via narrative assessment by educators. We choose the best slides to use (with some modification) in a real course setting, and compare the student perception of human vs. AI generated slides. We find that coding assistant tools produce slides that were most accurate, complete, and pedagogically sound. Additionally, students rate GenAI slides to be of similar quality as instructor-created slides, and cannot reliably identify which slides are AI-generated. Additionally, we find a negative correlation between a high quality rating and a high AI-generated'' rating, suggesting students associate poor quality with the source of the slides being AI. These findings highlight promising opportunities for integrating GenAI into instructional design workflows and call for further research on how educators can best harness such tools responsibly and effectively.
Juho Leinonen, Lisa Zhang, Arto Hellas
Aalto University · Espoo, Finland · University of Toronto Mississauga +1
Purpose: Higher education institutions face increasing pressure to audit course designs for generative AI (GenAI) integration. This paper presents an end-to-end method for using large language models (LLMs) to scan course information sheets at scale, identify where assessments may be vulnerable to student use of GenAI tools, validate system performance through iterative refinement, and operationalise results through direct stakeholder communication and effort. Method: We developed a four-phase pipeline: (0) manual pilot sampling, (1) iterative prompt engineering with multi-model comparison, (2) full production scan of 4,684 Bachelor and Master course information sheets (Academic Year 2024-2025) from the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB) with automated report generation and email distribution to teaching teams (91.4% address-matched) using a three-tier risk taxonomy (Clear risk, Potential risk, Low risk), and (3) longitudinal re-scan of 4,675 sheets after the next catalogue release. Results: Five iterations of prompt refinement achieved 87% agreement with expert labels. GPT-4o was selected for production based on superior handling of ambiguous cases involving internships and practical components. The Year 1 scan classified 60.3% of courses as Clear risk, 15.2% as Potential risk, and 24.5% as Low risk. Year 2 comparison revealed substantial shifts in risk distributions, with improvements most pronounced in practice-oriented programmes. Implications: The method enables institutions to rapidly transform heterogeneous catalogue data into structured and actionable intelligence. The approach is transferable to other audit domains (sustainability, accessibility, pedagogical alignment) and provides a template for responsible LLM deployment in higher education governance.
Brecht Verbeken, Joke Van den Broeck, Inge De Cleyn +4
With the increased use of generative AI (GenAI) applications such as ChatGPT, higher education institutions (HEIs) have released a range of guidelines and policies to direct adoption within their institutions. In computer science (CS) courses GenAI adoption is especially high and the implications for student learning are significant. At the same time, instructors have also been forced to address the use of GenAI as students have started to use it for a range of functions. Currently, comparative analysis of guidance provided by institutions and its uptake in instruction is lacking. In this paper we bridge this gap by comparing institutional and computing course level guidance to better understand this terrain. We utilize secondary analysis of institutional and course syllabi guidelines from higher education institutions in the U.S. classified as research-intensive. Our findings reveal that although institutional guidance is more pro-use, at the course-level the uptake is still guarded. We discuss the implications and propose an instructor-centered framework to guide future adoption of GenAI.
Amrita Ganguly, Aditya Johri, Nora McDonald +3
George Mason University Fairfax, VA, USA · Montgomery College Rockville, MD, USA