I'm starting my grad career under one of the co-founders of Galois (Andy Gill), and one of his projects while there was to build some kind of VHDL generator too

I'm starting my grad career under one of the co-founders of Galois (Andy Gill), and one of his projects while there was to build some kind of VHDL generator tool for encryption (I only saw a high level description in a presentation, so I may not be entirely accurate describing it as such). It created layouts that performed over 10% faster than the best hand-tuned layouts at the time. My understanding is that it was for the DoD.