Large-language models (LLMs) have exhibited great potential to assist chip designs and analysis. Recent research and efforts are mainly focusing on text-based tasks including general QA, debugging, design tool scripting, and so on. However, chip design and implementation workflow usually require a visual understanding of diagrams, flow charts, graphs, schematics, waveforms, etc, which demands the development of multimodality foundation models. In this paper, we propose ChipVQA, a benchmark designed to evaluate the capability of visual language models for chip design. ChipVQA includes 142 carefully designed and collected VQA questions covering five chip design disciplines: Digital Design, Analog Design, Architecture, Physical Design and Semiconductor Manufacturing. Unlike existing VQA benchmarks, ChipVQA questions are carefully designed by chip design experts and require indepth domain knowledge and reasoning to solve. We conduct comprehensive evaluations on both open-source and proprietary multimodal models that are greatly challenged by the benchmark suit. ChipVQA is available at https://github.com/phdyang007/chipvqa.

Despite recent advancements in code generation with large language models (LLMs), generating hardware code such as Verilog remains a significant challenge due to the scarcity of large-scale, high-quality datasets in the hardware domain. Existing approaches, including scraping open-source repositories and relying on manually curated datasets, often suffer from limited diversity, quality, and scalability. To address these limitations, we introduce LLM4Verilog, an exploratory, collaborative initiative aimed at constructing a large-scale, high-quality, open-source Verilog dataset. Our initiative integrates a community-driven data collection pipeline with a two-stage data filtering technique to ensure high dataset quality. The first stage removes duplicates and low-quality samples, resulting in a large-scale dataset called LLM4Verilog-complete. The second stage applies an LLM-driven quality scoring method, VeriScore, to perform fine-grained filtering and produce a high-quality, ready-to-use dataset called LLM4Verilog-filtered. We evaluate the effectiveness of these datasets through fine-tuning three different LLMs on our dataset, achieving 6.6%~11.2% and 5.3%~13.2% improvements in pass@1 scores on VerilogEval-human and VerilogEval-Machine, respectively, compared to models fine-tuned with prior state-of-the-art datasets. Notably, these improvements are achieved without relying on complex fine-tuning or data augmentation techniques, highlighting our dataset’s strong potential as a foundational resource for enhancing LLMs’ Verilog code generation capabilities. For more information about our initiative and resulting dataset, please refer to https://nvlabs.github.io/LLM4HWDesign/.

The application of large language models (LLMs) to digital hardware code generation is an emerging field, with most LLMs primarily trained on natural language and software code. Hardware code like Verilog constitutes a small portion of training data, and few hardware benchmarks exist. The open-source VerilogEval benchmark, released in November 2023, provided a consistent evaluation framework for LLMs on code completion tasks. Since then, both commercial and open models have seen significant development. In this work, we evaluate new commercial and open models since VerilogEval’s original release—including GPT-4o, GPT-4 Turbo, Llama3.1 (8B/70B/405B), Llama3 70B, Mistral Large, DeepSeek Coder (33B and 6.7B), CodeGemma 7B, and RTL-Coder—against an improved VerilogEval benchmark suite. We find measurable improvements in state-of-the-art models: GPT-4o achieves a 63% pass rate on specification-to-RTL tasks. The recently released and open Llama3.1 405B achieves a 58% pass rate, almost matching GPT-4o, while the smaller domain-specific RTL-Coder 6.7B models achieve an impressive 34% pass rate. Additionally, we enhance VerilogEval’s infrastructure by automatically classifying failures, introducing in-context learning support, and extending the tasks to specification-to-RTL translation. We find that prompt engineering remains crucial for achieving good pass rates and varies widely with model and task. A benchmark infrastructure that allows for prompt engineering and failure analysis is essential for continued model development and deployment.

Large Language Models (LLMs) show promise in streamlining hardware design, particularly in hardware code generation. However, the development of LLMs for this domain is severely hindered by the scarcity of large-scale, high-quality, and publicly accessible hardware code datasets. This shortage limits the effective fine-tuning of LLMs, impeding their ability to acquire hardware domain knowledge and generate practical designs. To address this challenge, we have organized the first-of-its-kind LLM4HWDesign contest, a community-driven initiative aimed at constructing a large-scale, high-quality dataset for hardware code generation. The contest adopts a two-phase approach, focusing on expanding the scale and quality of an existing hardware code generation dataset, respectively. By harnessing the collective efforts of the hardware design community, the LLM4HWDesign contest seeks to establish a critical resource for advancing LLM-assisted hardware design workflows. The primary goal of this initiative is to deliver a comprehensive dataset compiled from participants' submissions. We hope the released dataset will significantly advance the field of LLM-assisted hardware design and provide substantial benefits to the broader hardware community.

Functional coverage closure is an important but RTL simulation intensive aspect of constrained random verification. To reduce these computational demands, we propose test selection for functional coverage via machine learning (ML) based anomaly detection in the structural coverage space of fast functional simulators. We achieve promising results on two units from a state-of-the-art production GPU design. With our approach, an up to 85% RTL simulation runtime reduction can be achieved when compared to baseline constrained random test selection while achieving the same RTL functional coverage.

The increasing popularity of large language models (LLMs) has paved the way for their application in diverse domains. This paper proposes a benchmarking framework tailored specifically for evaluating LLM performance in the context of Verilog code generation for hardware design and verification. We present a comprehensive evaluation dataset consisting of 156 problems from the Verilog instructional website HDLBits. The evaluation set consists of a diverse set of Verilog code generation tasks, ranging from simple combinational circuits to complex finite state machines. The Verilog code completions can be automatically tested for functional correctness by comparing the transient simulation outputs of the generated design with a golden solution. We also demonstrate that the Verilog code generation capability of pretrained language models could be improved with supervised fine-tuning by bootstrapping with LLM generated synthetic problem-code pairs.

This article consists of a collection of slides from the author's conference presentation.

Deep neural networks have been adopted in a wide range of application domains, leading to high demand for inference accelerators. However, the high cost associated with ASIC hardware design makes it challenging to build custom accelerators for different targets. To lower design cost, we propose MAGNet, a modular accelerator generator for neural networks. MAGNet takes a target application consisting of one or more neural networks along with hardware constraints as input and produces synthesizable RTL for a neural network accelerator ASIC as well as valid mappings for running the target networks on the generated hardware. MAGNet consists of three key components: (i) MAGNet Designer, a highly configurable architectural template designed in C++ and synthesizable by high-level synthesis tools. MAGNet Designer supports a wide range of design-time parameters such as different data formats, diverse memory hierarchies, and dataflows. (ii) MAGNet Mapper, an automated framework for exploring different software mappings for executing a neural network on the generated hardware. (iii) MAGNet Tuner, a design space exploration framework encompassing the designer, the mapper, and a deep learning framework to enable fast design space exploration and co-optimization of architecture and application. We demonstrate the utility of MAGNet by designing an inference accelerator optimized for image classification application using three different neural networks-AlexNet, ResNet, and DriveNet. MAGNet-generated hardware is highly efficient and leverages a novel multi-level dataflow to achieve 40 fJ/op and 2.8 TOPS/mm2in a 16nm technology node for the ResNet-50 benchmark with <; 1% accuracy loss on the ImageNet dataset.

Package-level integration using multi-chip-modules (MCMs) is a promising approach for building large-scale systems. Compared to a large monolithic die, an MCM combines many smaller chiplets into a larger system, substantially reducing fabrication and design costs. Current MCMs typically only contain a handful of coarse-grained large chiplets due to the high area, performance, and energy overheads associated with inter-chiplet communication. This work investigates and quantifies the costs and benefits of using MCMs with fine-grained chiplets for deep learning inference, an application area with large compute and on-chip storage requirements. To evaluate the approach, we architected, implemented, fabricated, and tested Simba, a 36-chiplet prototype MCM system for deep-learning inference. Each chiplet achieves 4 TOPS peak performance, and the 36-chiplet MCM package achieves up to 128 TOPS and up to 6.1 TOPS/W. The MCM is configurable to support a flexible mapping of DNN layers to the distributed compute and storage units. To mitigate inter-chiplet communication overheads, we introduce three tiling optimizations that improve data locality. These optimizations achieve up to 16% speedup compared to the baseline layer mapping. Our evaluation shows that Simba can process 1988 images/s running ResNet-50 with batch size of one, delivering inference latency of 0.50 ms.

A high-productivity digital VLSI flow for designing complex SoCs is presented. The flow includes high-level synthesis tools, an object-oriented library of synthesizable SystemC and C++ components, and a modular VLSI physical design approach based on fine-grained globally asynchronous locally synchronous (GALS) clocking. The flow was demonstrated on a 16nm FinFET testchip targeting machine learning and computer vision.

In recent years, operating at near-threshold supply voltages has been proposed to improve energy efficiency in circuits, yet decreased efficacy of dynamic voltage scaling has been observed in recent planar technologies. However, foundries have introduced a shift from planar to FinFET fabrication processes. In this paper, we study 7nm FinFET's ability to voltage scale and compare it to planar technologies across three dynamic voltage scaling scenarios. The switch to FinFET allows for a return to strong voltage scalability. We find up to 8.6× higher energy efficiency at NT compared to nominal supply voltage (vs. 4.8× gain in 20nm planar).

With multi-core processors now mainstream, the shift to many-core processors poses a new set of design challenges. In particular, the scalability of coherence protocols remains a significant challenge. While complex Network-on-Chip interconnect fabrics have been proposed and in some cases implemented, most of industry has slowly evolved existing coherence solutions to meet the needs of a growing number of cores. Industries' slow adoption of Network-on-Chip designs is in large part due to the significant effort needed to design and verify the system. However, simply scaling bus-based coherence is not straightforward either because of increased contention and latency on the bus for large core counts.

Supply voltage scaling has stagnated in recent technology nodes, leading to so-called "dark silicon." In this paper, we investigate the limit of voltage scaling together with task parallelization to maintain task completion latency. When accounting for parallelization overheads, minimum task energy is obtained at "near threshold" supply-voltages across 6 commercial technology nodes and provides 4X improvement in overall CMP performance.

Thirty-four undergraduates implemented a MIPS R2000 processor for an introductory CMOS VLSI design course. This included designing a microarchitecture in Verilog, developing custom PLA generation and ad-hoc random testing tools, creating a standard cell library, schematics, layout, and PCB test board. The processor was fabricated by MOSIS on an AMI 0.5-micron process, included 160,000 transistors, and ran at 7.25 MHz.