A normalized dollar cost per LLM call reported alongside the figure of merit (FoM) is introduced, enabling fair comparison across effort levels and optimizers and finding the construction of the long-term memory matters little.
Abstract
Large language model (LLM) agents optimize the power, performance, and area (PPA) of register-transfer-level (RTL) designs by iterating over edits, synthesis, and PPA analysis, paying a dollar cost for every LLM call. Prior agents report the quality reached without its normalized cost, attribute that quality to an engineered cross-design memory, and hold the reasoning effort of every call fixed. We propose Ares with three corresponding innovations. (1) We introduce a normalized dollar cost per LLM call reported alongside the figure of merit (FoM), enabling fair comparison across effort levels and optimizers. (2) Using this accounting, we find the construction of the long-term memory matters little. An engineered memory brings no dependable gain over a plain concatenation of the same experience. (3) We instead adapt the per-call reasoning effort by escalating to deeper reasoning only once progress at a lower effort stalls, via a patience counter fit on 21 training designs, allocating reasoning where it pays rather than uniformly across all iterations. On three test designs unseen during training, the effort policy lowers the FoM by 23-27% where the best fixed effort reaches 16-23%, at equal normalized cost. Ares closes up to 83% of the gap from an LLM-drafted multiply-accumulate unit to its highly hand-optimized counterpart, and reaches a 25% deeper FoM than state-of-the-art Dr. RTL at 12% of its tokens.
SynAct is presented, an adaptive closed-loop LLM reasoning--acting agent that iteratively diagnoses live synthesis reports and reasons over the current circuit state, retrieved tool knowledge, and historical optimization experience to issue targeted commands to improve timing.
Fangzhou Liu, Peiyi Han, Jiawei Liu et al.· 0 citations
EDA flow parameter tuning is critical for quality-of-results~(QoR), yet the parameter space is large, tightly coupled, and full evaluations are prohibitively expensive. Prior LLM-assisted tuners mainly use the LLM as an external proposer with transient working context; we instead present \textbf{StateTune}, which reformulates LLM-assisted EDA tuning as a closed-loop, state-carrying process. Its optimizer state is a typed, evidence-gated \emph{persistent optimization memory} that is updated by every evaluation and shared between candidate generation and budget allocation. On top of this optimizer state, an expected hypervolume improvement (EHVI)-guided, runtime-aware promotion policy ranks quick-stage candidates by expected Pareto frontier gain per unit of runtime cost. Evaluated on a Cadence industrial flow across six benchmark blocks (two technology nodes \(\times\) three designs), against five baselines including LLM+retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and preference-based Bayesian optimization (BO) tuners, StateTune achieves the strongest final hypervolume on all six benchmark blocks, showing a stable improvement in frontier quality across the full matrix; it also matches or surpasses the strongest baselines on worst negative slack (WNS), area, and power across the same set. Ablation shows persistent memory is the largest contributor: removing it costs 58.5\% of the hypervolume. Dedicated analyses of evidence-gating sensitivity, memory poisoning, cross-design transfer, and three-seed reproducibility (CV\,\(<\)\,7\% on five of six blocks) further validate the memory design.
Kunlong Li, Shangshang Yao, Su Zheng et al.· 0 citations
A novel RAIE taxonomy along four scaling dimensions is proposed, which optimizes the entire thought process through search algorithms and self-verification, and introduces a task-oriented guideline for choosing the best TTS strategy.
Jia-Yu An, Zheng Chen, Yongcheng Jing et al.· 0 citations
Experimental results across multiple LLMs demonstrate the effectiveness of SeqFeed, which comprises two complementary mechanisms: an SQL-like waveform query language that enables agents to anchor queries to semantic events and sample signal values at relative time points, and a dependency graph that tracks signal propagation across clock cycles.
Agent Gym is introduced, a modular, domain-agnostic framework that wraps any existing LLM-based agent in a continuous evaluation-and-evolution loop and introduces the Spec-to-Note Gap, an autoencoder-inspired view of agentic system transparency.
Pouya Ghiasnezhad Omran, Michael Zimmermann, Duncan Cambridge et al.· 0 citations
