najaeda/naja-scope

**Let your AI assistant explore SystemVerilog designs — without pasting source code into the chat.**
naja-scope is an MCP server that gives AI
agents (Claude, and any MCP-compatible assistant) a precise, structured view of
your elaborated SystemVerilog design. Instead of dumping thousands of lines of
RTL into the model's context, the agent asks targeted questions — *what drives
this signal? what's inside this module? where does this net come from?* — and
gets back small, exact answers with file-and-line references.
Built on the najaeda netlist engine.
> **On a 17-question CVA6 benchmark,
> the same Claude Code agent scored 17/17 with naja-scope versus 10/17 with
> grep/read source tools — in 77 turns instead of 123, processing about 5×
> less input.** How it was measured ↓
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Why
Large designs don't fit in a chat window. Pasting RTL is slow, expensive, and
the model still can't reliably trace connectivity across hierarchy. naja-scope
turns your design into something an agent can *navigate*:
- 🔎 **Trace connectivity** — find what drives or loads any signal, across
module boundaries.
- 🌲 **Walk the hierarchy** — explore modules, instances, and ports on demand.
- 🎯 **Jump to source** — every answer comes with file:line ranges, so the
agent can quote the exact RTL that matters.
- 🧩 **Logic cones** — trace fan-in / fan-out combinational cones up to the
register boundary.
- 💡 **Recover design intent** — enum state names, struct/union fields, and
parameter formulas that normally vanish when a design is elaborated.
Works on **RTL and gate-level netlists** alike: load elaborated SystemVerilog,
or load a post-synthesis structural Verilog netlist together with its Liberty
standard-cell library and navigate the gates the same way (see
Gate-level designs). VHDL loading is in
beta.
All responses are token-bounded: lists paginate, large results truncate with
clear markers. Your context stays small; your answers stay accurate.
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Does it actually help?
naja-scope helps most when the answer exists in the elaborated design rather
than in any single source file. In an initial 17-question run on the
cv32a6_imac_sv32 configuration of
CVA6, the same Claude Code agent was
tested with naja-scope and with source-search tools alone.
| Agent setup | Provider and models | Initial automated score | Turns | Input processed | Output tokens |
|---|---|---:|---:|---:|---:|
| **Agent + naja-scope** | Anthropic Claude Code; claude-sonnet-4-6 with claude-haiku-4-5-20251001 helper | **17 / 17** | **77** | **1,058,556** | **19,520** |
| Agent + grep/read source | Anthropic Claude Code; claude-sonnet-4-6 with claude-haiku-4-5-20251001 helper | 10 / 17 | 123 | 5,461,719 | 55,962 |
The difference is clearest on structural questions that source search cannot
answer directly:
| CVA6 question | Agent + naja-scope | Agent + grep/read source |
|---|---|---|
| Flattened register groups under ex_stage_i | **92**, in 4 turns | No answer at the turn limit |
| Flattened register groups under commit_stage_i | **0**, in 3 turns | No answer at the turn limit |
| Elaborated hpdcache_mux variants | **20**, in 3 turns | No answer at the turn limit |
Source search remains the right tool for local textual questions. naja-scope
adds the elaborated hierarchy, connectivity, lowered primitives, and generated
or uniquified structures that are otherwise difficult to reconstruct.
See the benchmark methodology and multi-model runner
and historical result record for
configuration, scoring, token accounting, and reproducibility details.
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Install
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Connect it to Claude Code
Or add it to any MCP client's config:
Then just ask your assistant to load a design and start exploring:
> *"Load my UART design from rtl/uart.sv with top uart_top, then show me