This paper introduces Atelier, a large language model (LLM)-based framework for analog circuit design to address the issues of data scarcity and the substantial domain-specific knowledge required in this field. Atelier integrates general-purpose LLMs with a high-quality, compact knowledge base to fulfill the considerable knowledge requirements of analog circuit design, obviating the need for extensive domain-specific training or fine-tuning. The knowledge base is meticulously curated to be task-oriented and encapsulates critical information from pertinent literature within user-defined templates, leveraging the LLMs’ capabilities in text comprehension and summarization. The framework comprises several LLM agents, structured in a graph-of-thoughts architecture, with each agent specialized in a distinct task in analog circuit design, including circuit analysis, topology selection, topology modification, parameter tuning, and design decision. This collaborative multi-agent system, enriched with access to the compact knowledge base and advanced mechanisms such as self-reflection, backtracking, and tool integration, automates the analog circuit design process. It significantly enhances design quality and efficiency while ensuring interpretability. Experimental results highlight Atelier’s superiority over state-of-the-art black-box methods, general-purpose LLMs, and LLM-based methods, demonstrating notable improvements in success rates, design quality, and runtime.

Robust analog circuit design is becoming increasingly challenging due to process, voltage, and temperature (PVT) variations at advanced technology nodes. In this article, we formulate analog circuit synthesis as a robust optimization problem, and propose a Contextual Robust OptimiZAtion (CROZA) method for variation-aware analog circuit design. The proposed method uses Contextual Gaussian process to model both the design parameters and perturbation parameters, and a hybrid strategy of adversarially robust optimization and stochastically perturbed robust optimization to find robust solutions. Compared to state-of-the-art methods, our proposed approach achieves significant simulation and runtime speedups while delivering superior optimization results.

The system design of domain-specific processors is a challenging task due to the vast architecture-compiler search space and time-consuming simulation processes. Nowadays, architecture space exploration and compiler optimization are conducted in silo. However, due to the interdependence between microarchitecture and compiler, this segmented approach shrinks the hardware-software design space, leading to sub-optimal global outcomes. To solve problems in co-optimization, this paper introduces TL-CSE, a microarchitecture compiler co-design space exploration framework. It utilizes a bi-level optimization framework with transfer learning techniques to efficiently explore the hardware-software system design space. Results demonstrate that TL-CSE improves the quality of the Pareto optimal system by 31.5% and speeds up the exploration time by 6.1 times compared to previous co-design frameworks.

This paper presents INTO-OA, an interpretable topology optimization method for operational amplifiers (op-amps). We propose a Bayesian optimization-based approach to effectively explore the high-dimensional, discrete topology design space of op-amps. Our method integrates a Gaussian process surrogate model with the Weisfeiler-Lehman graph kernel to extract structural features from a dedicated circuit graph representation. It also employs a candidate generation strategy that combines random sampling with mutation to balance global exploration and local exploitation. Additionally, INTO-OA enhances interpretability by assessing the impact of circuit structures on performance, providing designers with valuable insights into generated topologies and enabling the interpretable refinement of existing designs. Experimental results demonstrate that INTO-OA achieves higher success rates, a 1.84× to 19.10x improvement in op-amp performance, and a 3.20x to 14.33× increase in topology optimization efficiency compared to state-of-the-art methods.

Bayesian optimization (BO) is more efficient in automatically synthesizing operational amplifier (opamp) topologies compared to conventional methods. However, the design space for behavior-level opamp topologies involves numerous connections that are difficult to comprehend, and evaluating each topology incurs substantial computational costs. To tackle these challenges, this brief introduces ATOM, an automatic opamp topology synthesis framework. We construct a concise design space for behavior-level opamp topologies, consisting of topologies that designers can easily understand. We propose an opamp topology optimization method that incorporates freeze-thaw BO. This method efficiently explores the design space and expedites the evaluation process. Experimental studies demonstrate that ATOM outperforms state-of-the-art topology synthesis methods in terms of success rate and optimization results while reducing the number of required simulations by up to 8.15 times. The source code for ATOM is available athttps://github.com/Jinyi-Shen/ATOM.

The design space exploration (DSE) of contemporary microprocessors faces a significant challenge of high-computational cost. In this context, we introduce Prior-boosted graph representation learning (GRL), a novel framework for the DSE of the microarchitectures the microprocessors underpinned by graph embeddings. Using GRL, Prior-boosted GRL constructs a compact and continuous vector space for design representation. This framework is further boosted by an efficient sampling algorithm informed by prior knowledge, which is instrumental in generating a superior set of initial designs to accelerate the exploration process. A well-designed ensemble surrogate model is combined with the multiobjective Bayesian optimization to explore the design space holistically within this graph-embedding domain. Rigorous experimental evaluations conducted on the RISC-V Berkeley-Out-of-Order Machine (BOOM) platform demonstrate that Prior-boosted GRL substantially surpasses preceding methods, achieving a 107.79% enhancement in Pareto front quality compared to the state-of-the-art DSE algorithm. It also outstrips manual designs on performance, power, and area metrics. As of this writing, Prior-boosted GRL holds the first place in the ICCAD 2022 CAD Contest evaluation platform.