Chip-Chat: Challenges and Opportunities in Conversational Hardware Design

轩辕志瑜

Modern hardware design starts with specifications provided in natural language. These are then translated by hardware engineers into appropriate Hardware Description Languages (hdls) such as verilog before synthesizing circuit elements. Automating this translation could reduce sources of human error from the engineering process. But, it is only recently that artificial intelligence (AI) has demonstrated capabilities for machine-based end-to-end design translations. Commercially-available instruction-tuned Large Language Models (LLMs) such as OpenAI's ChatGPT and Google's Bard claim to be able to produce code in a variety of programming languages; but studies examining them for hardware are still lacking. In this work, we thus explore the challenges faced and opportunities presented when leveraging these recent advances in LLMs for hardware design. Using a suite of 8 representative benchmarks, we examined the capabilities and limitations of the state of the art conversational LLMs when producing Verilog for functional and verification purposes. Given that the LLMs performed best when used interactively, we then performed a longer fully conversational case study where a hardware engineer co-designed a novel 8-bit accumulator-based microprocessor architecture. We sent the benchmarks and processor to tapeout in a Skywater 130nm shuttle, meaning that these 'Chip-Chats' resulted in what we believe to be the world's first wholly-AI-written HDL for tapeout.

翻译：
现代硬件设计始于以自然语言提供的规范。然后，在合成电路元件之前，硬件工程师会将这些翻译成适当的硬件描述语言 (HDL)，例如 Verilog。自动化此翻译可以减少工程过程中的人为错误来源。但是，直到最近，人工智能 (AI) 才展示了基于机器的端到端设计翻译的能力。商业上可用的指令调优大型语言模型（LLM），如 OpenAI 的 ChatGPT 和谷歌的 Bard，声称能够生成各种编程语言的代码；但是仍然缺乏对它们进行硬件检查的研究。因此，在这项工作中，我们探讨了在利用 LLM 的这些最新进展进行硬件设计时所面临的挑战和所带来的机遇。使用一套 8 个代表性基准，我们检查了最先进的会话 LLM 在为功能和验证目的生成 Verilog 时的能力和局限性。鉴于 LLM 在交互使用时表现最佳，我们随后进行了更长时间的完全对话式案例研究，其中一位硬件工程师共同设计了一种新颖的基于 8 位累加器的微处理器架构。我们将基准测试和处理器发送到 Skywater 130 纳米穿梭机上进行流片，这意味着这些“Chip-Chats”产生了我们认为是世界上第一个用于流片的完全由 AI 编写的 HDL。



URL：https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.13243

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