about
ChipGPT: How far are we from natural language hardware design (arxiv.org)
2 points by belter on May 25, 2023 | hide | past | pdf | 1 comment on HN

In plain words: A tool turns plain-English descriptions of chip logic into chip design code, then fixes the code and searches versions to pick the best one for your goals. It beat earlier tools and chatbots at producing usable, controllable designs with more options to choose from.

Abstract

As large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT exhibited unprecedented machine intelligence, it also shows great performance in assisting hardware engineers to realize higher-efficiency logic design via natural language interaction. To estimate the potential of the hardware design process assisted by LLMs, this work attempts to demonstrate an automated design environment that explores LLMs to generate hardware logic designs from natural language specifications. To realize a more accessible and efficient chip development flow, we present a scalable four-stage zero-code logic design framework based on LLMs without retraining or finetuning. At first, the demo, ChipGPT, begins by generating prompts for the LLM, which then produces initial Verilog programs. Second, an output manager corrects and optimizes these programs before collecting them into the final design space. Eventually, ChipGPT will search through this space to select the optimal design under the target metrics. The evaluation sheds some light on whether LLMs can generate correct and complete hardware logic designs described by natural language for some specifications. It is shown that ChipGPT improves programmability, and controllability, and shows broader design optimization space compared to prior work and native LLMs alone.

Kaiyan Chang, Ying Wang, Haimeng Ren, Mengdi Wang, Shengwen Liang, Yinhe Han, Huawei Li, Xiaowei Li
arXiv:2305.14019 · cs.AI, cs.AR, cs.PL · submitted May 23, 2023 · updated Oct 13, 2025
abstract · pdf · html · Accepted by 2023 NeurIPS SysML Workshop, retitled to "Improving Large Language Model Hardware Generating Quality through Post-LLM Search"

add comment on HN

"... this work attempts to demonstrate an automated design environment that explores LLMs to generate hardware logic designs from natural language specifications. To realize a more accessible and efficient chip development flow, we present a scalable four-stage zero-code logic design framework based on LLMs without retraining or finetuning. At first, the demo, ChipGPT, begins by generating prompts for the LLM, which then produces initial Verilog programs. Second, an output manager corrects and optimizes these programs before collecting them into the final design space. Eventually, ChipGPT will search through this space to select the optimal design under the target metrics. The evaluation sheds some light on whether LLMs can generate correct and complete hardware logic designs described by natural language for some specifications. It is shown that ChipGPT improves programmability, and controllability, and shows broader design optimization..."