Toward Agentic AI for the 6G Physical Layer: From Algorithm Discovery to Verified Baseband Silicon

Abstract

6G will be designed faster than it can be built: AI-driven search already proposes physical-layer algorithms at machine speed, while carrying a single one onto embedded baseband silicon remains specialist work. That silicon imposes hard memory and numeric limits, but also exposes cost structures a GPU lacks, and a design flow that never runs on the target sees neither. We present an agentic workflow in which an LLM coding agent implements algorithms on a commercial baseband SoC, optimizes them down to agent-written vector assembly, and validates them on silicon. The agent is guided by a knowledge base of measured platform facts, checked at every step against evaluators it is instructed never to edit, and metered per phase. We showcase the workflow on an AI-discovered orthogonal time frequency space (OTFS) detector portfolio on the open 6G4All platform. It yields twelve kernels that run cycle-exactly on silicon, their optimized versions at 18k-405k cycles (30-660 $\mu$s) per frame. It also yields a new detector shaped by the chip's measured costs that needs 13.9% fewer cycles than the port of the discovered detector while matching its error rate, with a measured edge our evaluation cannot statistically resolve, a structure that a hardware-blind search objective had no reason to find. What is not specific to OTFS is the workflow: an LLM agent exploring an implementation space under real hardware limits, with the cost of every choice measured rather than assumed.