Report for NSF Workshop on AI for Electronic Design Automation
Abstract
This report distills the discussions and recommendations from the NSF Workshop on AI for Electronic Design Automation (EDA), held on December 10, 2024 in Vancouver alongside NeurIPS 2024. Bringing together experts across machine learning and EDA, the workshop examined how AI-spanning large language models (LLMs), graph neural networks (GNNs), reinforcement learning (RL), neurosymbolic methods, etc.-can facilitate EDA and shorten design turnaround. The workshop includes four themes: (1) AI for physical synthesis and design for manufacturing (DFM), discussing challenges in physical manufacturing process and potential AI applications; (2) AI for high-level and logic-level synthesis (HLS/LLS), covering pragma insertion, program transformation, RTL code generation, etc.; (3) AI toolbox for optimization and design, discussing frontier AI developments that could potentially be applied to EDA tasks; and (4) AI for test and verification, including LLM-assisted verification tools, ML-augmented SAT solving, security/reliability challenges, etc. The report recommends NSF to foster AI/EDA collaboration, invest in foundational AI for EDA, develop robust data infrastructures, promote scalable compute infrastructure, and invest in workforce development to democratize hardware design and enable next-generation hardware systems. The workshop information can be found on the website https://ai4eda-workshop.github.io/.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2601.14541,
title = {Report for NSF Workshop on AI for Electronic Design Automation},
author = {Deming Chen and Vijay Ganesh and Weikai Li and Yingyan Celine Lin and Yong Liu and Subhasish Mitra and David Z. Pan and Ruchir Puri and Jason Cong and Yizhou Sun},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2601.14541},
year = {2026}
}
Comments
Accepted by IEEE Circuits and Systems Magazine (2026). This is the accepted version. The published version is available at https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/11466406