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.
By Guang Yang, Wei Zheng, Xiang Chen, Dong Liang, Peng Hu, Yukui Yang, Shaohang Peng, Zhenghan Li, Jiahui Feng, Xiao Wei, Kexin Sun, Deyuan Ma, Haotian Cheng, Yiheng Shen, Xing Hu, Terry Yue Zhuo, David Lo
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.
By Johann Knechtel, Ozgur Sinanoglu, Ramesh Karri
arXiv:2606. 08976v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: LLM-based RTL generation and reasoning is a promising direction for hardware design automation.
By Jing Wang, Shang Liu, Wenji Fang, Yuchao Wu, Yugao Zhu, Zhiyao Xie
arXiv:2606. 13735v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Language Models (LLM) have shown impressive capabilities in Register Transfer Level (RTL) code generation, particularly for Verilog.
By Yijun Shen, Minghao Shao, Yichen Zhao, Zhuoyan Yu, Boyuan Chen, Yik-Cheung Tam, Muhammad Shafique
arXiv:2606. 15500v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have facilitated impressive progress in software engineering, code generation, tooling, and systems.
By Jing Jin, Robert Chu, Ning Yan, Masood S. Mortazavi
arXiv:2606. 05680v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have enabled the automatic synthesis (generation) of register-transfer level (RTL) code from natural language instructions, offering a promising pathway to accelerate chip design.
By Mohammad Akyash, Nowfel Mashnoor, Kimia Azar, Hadi Kamali
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:2601. 08856v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Unit tests are critical in the hardware design lifecycle to ensure that component design modules are functionally correct and conform to the specification before they are integrated at the system level.
By Deeksha Nandal, Riccardo Revalor, Soham Dan, Debjit Pal
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:2607. 28877v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Verification consumes the majority of modern chip design effort, yet the formal verification tools that provide mathematical guarantees of correctness remain expensive and restrictively licensed.
By Ha Trung Tran
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.
By Kangwei Xu, Bing Li, Ulf Schlichtmann
arXiv:2606. 09867v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Optimizing register transfer level (RTL) code is of vital importance in hardware design.
By Qi Xiong, Renzhi Chen, Bowei Wang, Yuqing Xiong, Libo Huang, Lei Wang