Embedder, Verkor Team Up to Connect AI Chip Design With AI-Driven Firmware Development

Embedder, an AI coding agent for firmware and embedded systems, and Verkor, the company behind the autonomous chip design system Conductor, have announced a partnership linking AI-driven silicon design with AI-driven firmware development. Together, the two companies aim to cover the full development stack, from an initial written specification through verified embedded software.

New silicon has traditionally had to wait on software. Every chip requires bring-up code, drivers, and reference firmware before development can proceed, work that typically depends on vendor ecosystems built up over years. VerCore, the RISC-V core recently designed by Conductor, doesn't have that history. Embedder is designed to build that context from the ground up, grounding its work in reference documentation, and then drives test equipment to confirm the firmware actually functions on real silicon.

Ethan Gibbs, CEO of Embedder, said chip design used to take months, and that Verkor has now reduced that timeline to about a day. He said this shifts firmware into the next bottleneck, which is exactly the problem Embedder was built to address. He described working with a brand-new core that nobody has previously written code for as typically the hardest week of a firmware engineer's career, but said for Embedder, it's essentially routine work.

Verkor's Conductor produced VerCore,...