LLHD: Multi-Level Intermediate Representation for Hardware Description Languages (arxiv.org)

Isn't this what netlists are for?

I find it fascinating this research and MLIR[1] seem to have been developed independently around the same time. Figure 1 tells the same story in both papers. The authors mention the possibility of representing their concepts in MLIR, which could be really interesting.

[1] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2002.11054.pdf