Report for NSF Workshop on AI for Electronic Design Automation

TL;DR

This report summarizes discussions from the NSF Workshop on AI for Electronic Design Automation, highlighting AI's potential to improve various EDA tasks and recommending strategic investments and collaborations.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of AI applications in EDA and offers strategic recommendations for NSF to foster advancements and workforce development.

Findings

AI can facilitate physical synthesis and manufacturing processes.

AI techniques like LLMs and GNNs can enhance high-level and logic synthesis.

AI-driven tools can improve test, verification, and security in hardware design.

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/.