Ask-EDA: A Design Assistant Empowered by LLM, Hybrid RAG and Abbreviation De-hallucination

TL;DR

Ask-EDA is an AI-powered chat agent for electronic design engineers that combines large language models, hybrid retrieval techniques, and abbreviation de-hallucination to provide accurate, relevant, and expert-level guidance across various design tasks.

Contribution

This paper introduces Ask-EDA, a novel design assistant that integrates LLM, hybrid RAG, and ADH techniques to improve response accuracy and relevance in electronic design engineering.

Findings

Hybrid RAG improves recall by over 40% and 60% on key datasets.

ADH enhances abbreviation resolution recall by over 70%.

Ask-EDA effectively responds to design-related inquiries.

Abstract

Electronic design engineers are challenged to find relevant information efficiently for a myriad of tasks within design construction, verification and technology development. Large language models (LLM) have the potential to help improve productivity by serving as conversational agents that effectively function as subject-matter experts. In this paper we demonstrate Ask-EDA, a chat agent designed to serve as a 24x7 expert available to provide guidance to design engineers. Ask-EDA leverages LLM, hybrid retrieval augmented generation (RAG) and abbreviation de-hallucination (ADH) techniques to deliver more relevant and accurate responses. We curated three evaluation datasets, namely q2a-100, cmds-100 and abbr-100. Each dataset is tailored to assess a distinct aspect: general design question answering, design command handling and abbreviation resolution. We demonstrated that hybrid RAG offers over a 40% improvement in Recall on the q2a-100 dataset and over a 60% improvement on the cmds-100 dataset compared to not using RAG, while ADH yields over a 70% enhancement in Recall on the abbr-100 dataset. The evaluation results show that Ask-EDA can effectively respond to design-related inquiries.