Accurate power prediction in VLSI design is crucial for effective power optimization, especially as designs get transformed from gate-level netlist to layout stages. However, traditional accurate power simulation requires time-consuming back-end processing and simulation steps, which significantly impede design optimization. To address this, we propose ATLAS, which can predict the ultimate time-based layout power for any new design in the gate-level netlist. To the best of our knowledge, ATLAS is the first work that supports both time-based power simulation and general cross-design power modeling. It achieves such general timebased power modeling by proposing a new pre-training and fine-tuning paradigm customized for circuit power. Targeting golden per-cycle layout power from commercial tools, our ATLAS achieves the mean absolute percentage error (MAPE) of only ${0. 5 8 \%, ~} {0. 4 5 \%}$, and ${5. 1 2 \%}$ for the clock tree, register, and combinational power groups, respectively, without any layout information. Overall, the MAPE for the total power of the entire design is $\lt1 \%$, and the inference speed of a workload is significantly faster than the standard flow of commercial tools.

In recent years, AI-assisted IC design methods have demonstrated great potential, but the availability of circuit design data is extremely limited, especially in the public domain. The lack of circuit data has become the primary bottleneck in developing AI-assisted IC design methods. In this work, we make the first attempt, SynCircuit, to generate new synthetic circuits with valid functionalities in the HDL format.SynCircuit automatically generates synthetic data using a framework with three innovative steps: 1) We propose a customized diffusion-based generative model to resolve the Directed Cyclic Graph (DCG) generation task, which has not been well explored in the AI community. 2) To ensure our circuit is valid, we enforce the circuit constraints by refining the initial graph generation outputs. 3) The Monte Carlo tree search (MCTS) method further optimizes the logic redundancy in the generated graph. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed SynCircuit can generate more realistic synthetic circuits and enhance ML model performance in downstream circuit design tasks.

In recent years, AI-assisted integrated circuit (IC) design methods have shown great potential in boosting IC design efficiency.However, this emerging technique is fundamentally limited by the serious scarcity of publicly accessible large-scale circuit design data, which are mostly private IPs owned by semiconductor companies.In this work, we propose SynC-LLM, the first technique that exploits LLM's ability to generate new large-scale synthetic circuits.Our hierarchical circuit generation process includes three stages: 1) A directed graph diffusion model will learn to generate the skeleton of large circuits with sequential registers.2) The expected function of the input cone of each sequential register will be annotated.Each cone, named flesh, consists of all combinational logic that controls the register value.3) A level-by-level customized prompting technique will guide LLM to complete the design code of each cone.Experiments show that our generated circuits are not only valid and fully functional 1 , but also closely resemble realistic large-scale designs and can significantly improve AI models' performance in multiple IC design tasks.The code and data are open-sourced in https://github.com/hkust-zhiyao/SynCircuitData.

High-level synthesis (HLS) accelerates hardware design by enabling the automatic translation of high-level descriptions into efficient hardware implementations. However, debugging HLS code is a challenging and labor-intensive task, especially for novice circuit designers or software engineers without sufficient hardware domain knowledge. The recent emergence of Large Language Models (LLMs) is promising in automating the HLS debugging process. Despite the great potential, three key challenges persist when applying LLMs to HLS logic debugging: 1) High-quality circuit data for training LLMs is scarce, posing a significant challenge. 2) Debugging logic bugs in hardware is inherently more complex than identifying software bugs with existing golden test cases. 3) The absence of reliable test cases requires multi-tasking solutions, performing both bug identification and correction. In this work, we propose a customized solution named HLSDebugger1, to address the challenges. HLSDebugger first generates and releases a large labeled dataset with 300K data samples, targeting HLS logic bugs. The HLSDebugger model adopts an encoder-decoder structure, performing bug location identification, bug type prediction, and bug correction with the same model. HLSDebugger significantly outperforms advanced LLMs like GPT-4 in bug identification and by more than 3× in bug correction. It makes a substantial advancement in the exploration of automated debugging of HLS code.

The automatic generation of RTL code (e.g., Verilog) using natural language instructions and large language models (LLMs) has attracted significant research interest recently. However, most existing approaches heavily rely on commercial LLMs, such as ChatGPT, while open-source LLMs tailored for this specific design generation task exhibit notably inferior performance. The absence of high-quality open-source solutions restricts the flexibility and data privacy of this emerging technique. In this study, we present a new customized LLM solution with a modest parameter count of only 7B, achieving better performance than GPT-3.5 on all representative benchmarks for RTL code generation. Especially, it outperforms GPT-4 in VerilogEval Machine benchmark. This remarkable balance between accuracy and efficiency is made possible by leveraging our new RTL code dataset and a customized LLM algorithm, both of which have been made fully open-source. Furthermore, we have successfully quantized our LLM to 4-bit with a total size of 4 GB, enabling it to function on a single laptop with only slight performance degradation. This efficiency allows the RTL generator to serve as a local assistant for engineers, ensuring all design privacy concerns are addressed.