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
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
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. Even with high-level synthesis (HLS), designers still need extensive hardware expertise to build high-performance accelerators.
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:2603. 04177v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: LLM coding agents can generate working code, but their solutions often accumulate complexity, duplication, and architectural debt.
By Alex Thillen, Niels M\"undler, Veselin Raychev, Martin Vechev
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.
By Jinyuan Deng, Zhengrui Chen, Xufeng Wei, Tianyu Xing, Chenyi Wen, Cheng Zhuo
BuildBench introduces a realistic benchmark for evaluating large language model agents on the task of compiling open‑source software (OSS). It includes diverse OSS projects that lack clear build instructions, have undocumented dependencies, and may require source patching or script modification. The authors also present OSS‑BUILD‑AGENT, a baseline LLM‑based agent that retrieves build instructions effectively and achieves state‑of‑the‑art performance on the benchmark.
By Zehua Zhang, Ati Priya Bajaj, Divij Handa, Siyu Liu, Arvind S Raj, Hongkai Chen, Hulin Wang, Yibo Liu, Zion Leonahenahe Basque, Souradip Nath, Vishal Juneja, Nikhil Chapre, Tiffany Bao, Yan Shoshitaishvili, Adam Doup\'e, Chitta Baral, Ruoyu Wang
arXiv:2606. 20373v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) show promise for code compilation tasks, but applying them to runtime performance tuning is difficult due to complex microarchitectural effects and noisy runtime measurements.
By Zepeng Li, Jie Ren, Zhanyong Tang, Jie Zheng, Zheng Wang
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
REFINE is a tool-agnostic, evidence-aware multi-agent approach that generates Java file-level refactoring candidates by combining static analysis, smell-informed planning, LLM-based transformation, and automated re-analysis. In experiments on 450 Java files from 15 open-source systems, REFINE reduced detected code smells by 68–73% across three LLM configurations, achieving higher median reductions with smaller edits compared to a direct-prompt baseline. However, the tool’s outputs still pose risks such as assert/fail-call changes and public-method removal, requiring compilation, testing, dependency analysis, and human review before deployment.
By Muhammad Waseem, Aakash Ahmad, Pekka Abrahamsson
arXiv:2603. 20075v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Compilers are critical to modern computing, yet fixing compiler bugs is difficult.
By Yingwei Zheng, Cong Li, Shaohua Li, Yuqun Zhang, Zhendong Su
arXiv:2607. 07321v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Tool utilization enables Large Language Model (LLM) agents to interact with the real world and resolve complex tasks.
By Haipeng Ding, Yuexiang Xie, Zhewei Wei, Yaliang Li, Bolin Ding