ML For Hardware Design Interpretability: Challenges and Opportunities

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Baartmans, Raymond, Ensinger, Andrew, Agostinelli, Victor, Chen, Lizhong
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
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author Baartmans, Raymond
Ensinger, Andrew
Agostinelli, Victor
Chen, Lizhong
author_facet Baartmans, Raymond
Ensinger, Andrew
Agostinelli, Victor
Chen, Lizhong
contents The increasing size and complexity of machine learning (ML) models have driven the growing need for custom hardware accelerators capable of efficiently supporting ML workloads. However, the design of such accelerators remains a time-consuming process, heavily relying on engineers to manually ensure design interpretability through clear documentation and effective communication. Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) offer a promising opportunity to automate these design interpretability tasks, particularly the generation of natural language descriptions for register-transfer level (RTL) code, what we refer to as "RTL-to-NL tasks." In this paper, we examine how design interpretability, particularly in RTL-to-NL tasks, influences the efficiency of the hardware design process. We review existing work adapting LLMs for these tasks, highlight key challenges that remain unaddressed, including those related to data, computation, and model development, and identify opportunities to address them. By doing so, we aim to guide future research in leveraging ML to automate RTL-to-NL tasks and improve hardware design interpretability, thereby accelerating the hardware design process and meeting the increasing demand for custom hardware accelerators in machine learning and beyond.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2504_08852
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle ML For Hardware Design Interpretability: Challenges and Opportunities
Baartmans, Raymond
Ensinger, Andrew
Agostinelli, Victor
Chen, Lizhong
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Hardware Architecture
The increasing size and complexity of machine learning (ML) models have driven the growing need for custom hardware accelerators capable of efficiently supporting ML workloads. However, the design of such accelerators remains a time-consuming process, heavily relying on engineers to manually ensure design interpretability through clear documentation and effective communication. Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) offer a promising opportunity to automate these design interpretability tasks, particularly the generation of natural language descriptions for register-transfer level (RTL) code, what we refer to as "RTL-to-NL tasks." In this paper, we examine how design interpretability, particularly in RTL-to-NL tasks, influences the efficiency of the hardware design process. We review existing work adapting LLMs for these tasks, highlight key challenges that remain unaddressed, including those related to data, computation, and model development, and identify opportunities to address them. By doing so, we aim to guide future research in leveraging ML to automate RTL-to-NL tasks and improve hardware design interpretability, thereby accelerating the hardware design process and meeting the increasing demand for custom hardware accelerators in machine learning and beyond.
title ML For Hardware Design Interpretability: Challenges and Opportunities
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Hardware Architecture
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.08852