You’re preaching to the choir on improving validation. Like you mentioned, In commercial designs that’s where a majority of the man hours actually go, and coincidentally where basically none go in academia where chisel is popular.

I will mention though, not all IP needs max PPA or specific control of the netlist and there could be initial opportunities there. Especially with the cost per area on many nodes going significantly down it can be more economical, at some volumes, to save man hours with HLS even if it leads to larger areas, which in theory means more production cost but in reality might not even change the floor plan.

I think we’re going to see more HLS, not less.