arXiv AI

CLOSER-Bench: Evaluating Budgeted Cross-Stage Design Closure for Hardware Agents

arXiv:2607. 16632v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Hardware engineering exposes coding agents to a form of long-horizon work that is difficult to capture with pass-at-k: progress is continuous, tool feedback is delayed and heterogeneous, and a backend failure may require revising RTL rather than tuning another physical-design parameter.

arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 28

Benchmarking LLMs for Verilog Design Flows

arXiv:2607. 22759v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) show promise in code generation, but their capabilities to produce correct, synthesizable hardware description language (HDL) code still remain to be properly benchmarked.

By Angshuman Chakravertty, Rahul Koshti, Buddhi Prakash Sharma, Vinay Chamola
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 26

QiMeng-ChipV-RTL: Exploiting Information Locality for IP-level Verilog Generation

QiMeng-ChipV-RTL is a multi‑agent framework that tackles the challenges of generating Register‑Transfer Level (RTL) code for industrial IP‑level hardware design. By partitioning long design documents into short, localized tasks and using hierarchical planning, localized code generation, interface‑consistent merging, and AST‑guided debugging, it scales to complex specifications. Experiments on the RealBench benchmark show ChipV-RTL achieves a 45.0% pass rate, outperforming state‑of‑the‑art LLMs and agents which reach only 21.6%.

By Hanqi Lyu, Di Huang, Yaoyu Zhu, Kangcheng Liu, Bohan Dou, Chongxiao Li, Pengwei Jin, Shuyao Cheng, Rui Zhang, Zidong Du, Qi Guo, Xing Hu, Yunji Chen
arXiv AI
Aug 5

Don't Regenerate, Debug: A Domain-Specific Agent for Repairing Near-Miss Hardware Operators

arXiv:2608. 02712v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Kernel generation for hardware accelerators such as GPUs and NPUs has become a proving ground for large language models (LLMs), and state-of-the-art systems raise correctness through pipelines that couple LLMs with agentic reinforcement learning and evolutionary search.

By Yansong Sun, Shenxiu Wu, Siyuan Chen, Runlin Hou, Junhao Qiu, Junming Cao, Shudi Shao, Zhichao Lu, Qingfu Zhang
arXiv AI
Aug 10

HLSmith: An Expert-Guided Agentic Framework for C/C++-to-HLS Translation

arXiv:2608. 06791v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Application-specific FPGA accelerators offer substantial performance and energy-efficiency gains across many application domains, but developing them is costly, often requiring months of specialized effort.

By Yuebo Luo, Ahmad Sedigh Baroughi, Philip Stachura, Le Chen, Venkatram Vishwanath, Zhenman Fang, Caiwen Ding
arXiv AI
Jul 22

Bridging the Last Mile of Circuit Design: PostEDA-Bench, a Hierarchical Benchmark for PPA Convergence and DRC Fixing

arXiv:2605. 06936v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: LLM-based agents are increasingly applied to the "last mile" of Electronic Design Automation (EDA): repairing residual sign-off Design Rule Check (DRC) violations and converging Power-Performance-Area (PPA) targets after tool runs.

By Pengju Liu, Nuo Xu, Jinwei Tang, Yu Cao, Caiwen Ding
arXiv AI
Sep 21

Can Agents Design Better Chips with a Higher Level Abstraction?

Large Language Model agents are being explored for chip design, but most methods work directly at RTL. This study compares Direct RTL Design, Agent-based HLS Design, Post-Compiler HLS Refinement, and Post-HLS RTL Refinement, and proposes a combined workflow called Agent-based HLS with RTL Refinement (AHRR). Using FPGAs for evaluation, AHRR achieves a 2.6× geometric‑mean speedup over Direct RTL Design across an 11‑task benchmark suite, demonstrating that higher‑level abstractions and subsequent RTL refinement can improve chip design efficiency.

By Zijian Ding, Yang Zou, Yizhou Sun, Jason Cong