The 20th century was filled with many wonders: the eradication of smallpox, flying machines, air conditioning, drive-throughs, microchips with millions of transistors, and the introduction of Verilog. Yet modern microchips have 10,000x more transistors than then; their design and manufacture is only feasible with abstraction and computerized tooling, and this tooling hasn't kept up. Compiler algorithms and formal methods are central to modern hardware development, but the adoption of modern compiler algorithms (e.g. SSA) and infrastructure has been slow. To address this, the CIRCT project is building a MLIR-based framework for hardware tool development. CIRCT is an LLVM incubator project, with a diverse and active community. This talk is targeted at a wide audience: it gives an introduction to the problems in modern hardware development, explains how compiler techniques are essential, and how this bodes well for the future of hardware. Further, hardware is not software, and the structure of IR differs from software in some interesting ways, we will discuss those too. Finally, this isn’t a toy - we will share our experience adopting compilers built with CIRCT in production products.