Researchers at the University of Edinburgh published a technical perspective titled “LLMs in Digital EDA: A perspective on shifting roles from Generation to Orchestration.” The abstract excerpt defines three hierarchical roles showing how capability accumulates: a Generator that produces design artifacts in a single pass, an Agent that refines outputs through iterative tool feedback, and an Orchestrator that coordinates decisions across EDA-stages. Across published systems, this reveals a syntax trap in which models are trained to produce plausible code rather than physically correct hardware, compounded by fragmented tools and loss of design context that obscure how decisions affect later stages. Comparisons across the three roles show that current approaches struggle to scale to industrial designs, motivating a shift towards a standardised, physics-aware orchestrator that connects tools and agents across the EDA flow for more reliable and accessible hardware design. The paper is by Youngman, Matthew, Cristian Sestito, and Themis Prodromakis, titled “LLMs in Digital EDA: A perspective on shifting roles from Generation to Orchestration,” arXiv preprint arXiv:2608.27184, dated August 2026.