Silicon engineering seems unobtainable elite industry only for those veterans of the industry that have access to expensive instruments and years of experience, right? Well, not anymore! With AI tools, coding agents and more and more available substrate to hook them up to, you can approach it as a system design, and start in days! Make new models inference on novel accelerator cards, put open cores in FPGA, and other tricks you can do without specialized engineering degrees. Not suggesting to tape it out and put it in production without proper review, but for prototyping and faster feedback cycles it's really changing the game! I'll demo a couple of examples all based on open IP!