Architect of the Bits World: Masked Autoregressive Modeling for Circuit Generation Guided by Truth Table

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel method combining generative models and differentiable architecture search to improve circuit generation from truth tables, achieving better scalability and performance in logic synthesis.

Contribution

It presents CircuitVQ and CircuitAR, novel models that enhance circuit generation from truth tables, addressing limitations of existing methods with improved scalability and accuracy.

Findings

CircuitAR can generate complex circuit structures.

The method outperforms traditional logic synthesis tools.

Scalability and emergent capabilities demonstrated in experiments.

Abstract

Logic synthesis, a critical stage in electronic design automation (EDA), optimizes gate-level circuits to minimize power consumption and area occupancy in integrated circuits (ICs). Traditional logic synthesis tools rely on human-designed heuristics, often yielding suboptimal results. Although differentiable architecture search (DAS) has shown promise in generating circuits from truth tables, it faces challenges such as high computational complexity, convergence to local optima, and extensive hyperparameter tuning. Consequently, we propose a novel approach integrating conditional generative models with DAS for circuit generation. Our approach first introduces CircuitVQ, a circuit tokenizer trained based on our Circuit AutoEncoder We then develop CircuitAR, a masked autoregressive model leveraging CircuitVQ as the tokenizer. CircuitAR can generate preliminary circuit structures from truth tables, which guide DAS in producing functionally equivalent circuits. Notably, we observe the scalability and emergent capability in generating complex circuit structures of our CircuitAR models. Extensive experiments also show the superior performance of our method. This research bridges the gap between probabilistic generative models and precise circuit generation, offering a robust solution for logic synthesis.