LLM for EDA in Front-End Design: Challenges and Opportunities
arXiv:2607. 09616v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: As chip complexity increases and time-to-market pressures grow, front-end design has become a critical bottleneck in chip development.
The paper introduces Back-to-the-Future (BTTF), an agentic framework designed to automate post-simulation verification and waveform debugging in chip design. BTTF transforms large simulation dumps into a normalized SQLite database and uses a multi-agent orchestration engine to convert natural-language queries into schema-aware SQL, linking anomalies to versioned RTL code. In a benchmark of 150 queries, BTTF achieves 95.33% execution accuracy, demonstrating a viable path toward autonomous EDA verification.
arXiv:2607. 09616v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: As chip complexity increases and time-to-market pressures grow, front-end design has become a critical bottleneck in chip development.
arXiv:2601.19747v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: In the rapidly evolving field of Electronic Design Automation (EDA), the deployment of Large Language Models (LLMs) for Register-Transfer Lev...
The paper surveys how large language models (LLMs) are being used in hardware verification, covering tasks such as assertion generation, testbench creation, bug localization, and formal reasoning. It categorizes the literature by methodology, verification goal, tool interaction, benchmarks, and evaluation metrics, and distinguishes between inference-time techniques (prompting, retrieval, structured reasoning, agentic workflows) and training-time adaptation. The authors highlight that LLMs excel as semantic reasoning, search, and orchestration components within verification workflows, yet emphasize the need for semantic alignment, scalable integration, generalization, and rigorous evaluation to ensure true verification correctness.
arXiv:2608. 04032v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Modern chip design relies on electronic design automation (EDA) tools that generate large, heterogeneous artifacts, including source files, scripts, logs, netlists, and reports.
arXiv:2606. 28279v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We present HORIZON, a self-evolving agent framework that treats hardware design as repository-level code evolution.
arXiv:2607. 17528v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: LLM-driven agent systems have emerged as a promising paradigm for electronic design automation (EDA), demonstrating strong potential for automating complex design workflows.
arXiv:2605. 10807v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The integration of Large Language Models (LLMs) into Electronic Design Automation (EDA) and hardware security is rapidly reshaping the semiconductor industry.
The article discusses how large language models (LLMs) are transforming electronic design automation (EDA) by moving beyond isolated task assistance to a hierarchical framework of roles: Generator, Agent, and Orchestrator. It highlights that current LLM-based solutions often produce plausible but not physically correct hardware, suffer from fragmented tools, and lose design context, which hampers scalability to industrial designs. The authors argue for a standardized, physics-aware Orchestrator that integrates tools and agents across the EDA flow to improve reliability and accessibility of hardware design.
arXiv:2610.02376v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Co-designing ML models and the accelerators that run them is an unusual reasoning task: architects must draw confident, high-stakes conclusions about...
E2E-SWE is a benchmark that tests large language models’ ability to create complete, functional software repositories from scratch. It includes 186 tasks across 11 programming languages, each requiring an agent to build an installable project based solely on a natural‑language specification and an empty workspace, while passing a hidden test suite. The benchmark was crafted by software engineers and LLMs, then refined through iterative verification by autonomous agents to ensure clarity and solvability.
The article reviews the growing use of Large Language Models (LLMs) for generating Verilog code, a key hardware description language in electronic design automation. It surveys 102 papers, covering conferences, journals, and preprints, and addresses four research questions about LLM selection, datasets, techniques, and alignment strategies. The review identifies current limitations and proposes a roadmap for future research in LLM-assisted hardware design.
Functional verification dominates integrated circuit (IC) front-end engineering effort, and a single missed bug that escapes to silicon can trigger a costly respin. Recent large language models (LLMs) offer new opportunities to automate this process, yet existing LLM-based approaches generate each component through independent single-turn calls with no shared context, leaving interface mismatches undetected and reported coverage disconnected from specification requirements.