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Related papers: Are LLMs Any Good for High-Level Synthesis?

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Recent Large Language Models (LLMs) such as OpenAI o3-mini and DeepSeek-R1 use enhanced reasoning through Chain-of-Thought (CoT). Their potential in hardware design, which relies on expert-driven iterative optimization, remains unexplored.…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-04-15 Luca Collini , Andrew Hennessee , Ramesh Karri , Siddharth Garg

High-level synthesis (HLS) tools have brought FPGA development into the mainstream, by allowing programmers to design architectures using familiar languages such as C, C++, and OpenCL. While the move to these languages has brought…

Hardware Architecture · Computer Science 2019-10-11 Johannes de Fine Licht , Torsten Hoefler

High-Level Synthesis (HLS) plays a crucial role in modern hardware design by transforming high-level code into optimized hardware implementations. However, progress in applying machine learning (ML) to HLS optimization has been hindered by…

Hardware Architecture · Computer Science 2025-08-05 Zedong Peng , Zeju Li , Mingzhe Gao , Qiang Xu , Chen Zhang , Jieru Zhao

Compiling high-level programs to target high-speed packet-processing pipelines is a challenging combinatorial optimization problem. The compiler must configure the pipeline's resources to match the high-level semantics of the program, while…

Networking and Internet Architecture · Computer Science 2022-11-22 Xiangyu Gao , Divya Raghunathan , Ruijie Fang , Tao Wang , Xiaotong Zhu , Anirudh Sivaraman , Srinivas Narayana , Aarti Gupta

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable potential in hardware front-end design using hardware description languages (HDLs). However, their inherent tendency toward hallucination often introduces functional errors into the…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-11-21 Kangwei Xu , Grace Li Zhang , Ulf Schlichtmann , Bing Li

High-Level Synthesis (HLS) is emerging as a mainstream design methodology, allowing software designers to enjoy the benefits of a hardware implementation. Significant work has led to effective compilers that produce high-quality hardware…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2015-08-28 Jeffrey Goeders , Steven J. E. Wilton

Large Language Models (LLMs) offer transformative potential for Modeling & Simulation (M&S) through natural language interfaces that simplify workflows. However, over-reliance risks compromising quality due to ambiguities, logical…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-06-16 Philippe J. Giabbanelli , John Beverley , Istvan David , Andreas Tolk

High-level synthesis (HLS) accelerates hardware design by enabling the automatic translation of high-level descriptions into efficient hardware implementations. However, debugging HLS code is a challenging and labor-intensive task,…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-07-30 Jing Wang , Shang Liu , Yao Lu , Zhiyao Xie

The increasing use of Advanced Language Models (ALMs) in diverse sectors, particularly due to their impressive capability to generate top-tier content following linguistic instructions, forms the core of this investigation. This study…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-10 Kiran Thorat , Jiahui Zhao , Yaotian Liu , Hongwu Peng , Xi Xie , Bin Lei , Jeff Zhang , Caiwen Ding

Large Language Models (LLMs) are revolutionizing industries by enhancing efficiency, scalability, and innovation. This paper investigates the potential of LLMs in automating Computer-Aided Design (CAD) workflows, by integrating FreeCAD with…

Human-Computer Interaction · Computer Science 2025-08-05 Sumit Kumar , Sarthak Kapoor , Harsh Vardhan , Yao Zhao

High-level synthesis (HLS) transforms an algorithmic description of hardware from a higher abstraction (e.g., C/C++) into a register-transfer level (RTL) design, offering reduced development time and greater flexibility in design space…

Hardware Architecture · Computer Science 2026-04-27 Xiaofeng Zhou , Linfeng Du , Guangyu Hu , Sharad Sinha , Hongce Zhang , Wei Zhang

The rise of large language models has sparked interest in AI-driven hardware design, raising the question: does high-level synthesis (HLS) still matter in the agentic era? We argue that HLS remains essential. While we expect mature agentic…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-10 Niansong Zhang , Sunwoo Kim , Shreesha Srinath , Zhiru Zhang

With Large Language Models (LLMs) recently demonstrating impressive proficiency in code generation, it is promising to extend their abilities to Hardware Description Language (HDL). However, LLMs tend to generate single HDL code blocks…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-10 Jinwei Tang , Jiayin Qin , Kiran Thorat , Chen Zhu-Tian , Yu Cao , Yang , Zhao , Caiwen Ding

Digital systems are growing in importance and computing hardware is growing more heterogeneous. Hardware design, however, remains laborious and expensive, in part due to the limitations of conventional hardware description languages (HDLs)…

In this work, we present a new approach to high level synthesis (HLS), where high level functions are first mapped to an architectural template, before hardware synthesis is performed. As FPGA platforms are especially suitable for…

Hardware Architecture · Computer Science 2016-06-22 Shaoyi Cheng , John Wawrzynek

The design flow of processors, particularly in hardware description languages (HDL) like Verilog and Chisel, is complex and costly. While recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have significantly improved coding tasks in software…

High-level synthesis (HLS) is a process that automatically translates a software program in a high-level language into a low-level hardware description. However, the hardware designs produced by HLS tools still suffer from a significant…

Programming Languages · Computer Science 2023-08-16 Jianyi Cheng , Samuel Coward , Lorenzo Chelini , Rafael Barbalho , Theo Drane

In high-level synthesis (HLS), C/C++ programs with synthesis directives are used to generate circuits for FPGA implementations. However, hardware-specific and platform-dependent characteristics in these implementations can introduce…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-07-28 Kangwei Xu , Bing Li , Grace Li Zhang , Ulf Schlichtmann

Custom hardware accelerators for Deep Neural Networks are increasingly popular: in fact, the flexibility and performance offered by FPGAs are well-suited to the computational effort and low latency constraints required by many image…

Hardware Architecture · Computer Science 2021-03-25 Serena Curzel , Nicolò Ghielmetti , Michele Fiorito , Fabrizio Ferrandi

Large Language Models (LLMs) represent a class of deep learning models adept at understanding natural language and generating coherent responses to various prompts or queries. These models far exceed the complexity of conventional neural…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-05 Minghao Shao , Abdul Basit , Ramesh Karri , Muhammad Shafique