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.