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.
Machine-generated by The Flow from the publisher's headline and feed description — not written or checked by a human. The full article lives at arXiv Machine Learning.
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: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.
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.
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.
arXiv:2606. 28279v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We present HORIZON, a self-evolving agent framework that treats hardware design as repository-level code evolution.
The paper investigates whether locally deployed large language models can automate hardware design workflows that involve repetitive, dependency-ordered operations using specialized tools. A Model Context Protocol (MCP) server is created to emulate a proprietary hardware design tool, and a benchmark tests single and multi-step edits, invalid requests, misspelled prompts, and multi-server contexts. Seven open-source models are evaluated across different pipeline choices, revealing that strong models can nearly fully cover expected calls, but reliability hinges on task structure and agent configuration, with comprehensive tool descriptions reducing failures and multi-agent setups aiding weaker models at the cost of extra calls.