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Main Authors: Wang, Jing, Li, Zheng, Li, Lei, He, Fan, Lin, Liyu, Lai, Yao, Li, Yan, Zeng, Xiaoyang, Guo, Yufeng
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.05675
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author Wang, Jing
Li, Zheng
Li, Lei
He, Fan
Lin, Liyu
Lai, Yao
Li, Yan
Zeng, Xiaoyang
Guo, Yufeng
author_facet Wang, Jing
Li, Zheng
Li, Lei
He, Fan
Lin, Liyu
Lai, Yao
Li, Yan
Zeng, Xiaoyang
Guo, Yufeng
contents Recent years have witnessed growing interest in adopting large language models (LLMs) for Register Transfer Level (RTL) code optimization. While powerful cloud-based LLMs offer superior optimization capabilities, they pose unacceptable intellectual property (IP) leakage risks when processing proprietary hardware designs. In this paper, we propose a new scenario where Verilog code must be optimized for specific attributes without leaking sensitive IP information. We introduce the first IP-preserving edge-cloud collaborative framework that leverages the benefits of both paradigms. Our approach employs local small LLMs (e.g., Qwen-2.5-Coder-7B) to perform secure comparative analysis between paired high-quality target designs and novice draft codes, yielding general design principles that summarize key insights for improvements. These principles are then used to query stronger cloud LLMs (e.g., Deepseek-V3) for targeted code improvement, ensuring that only abstracted and IP-safe guidance reaches external services. Our experimental results demonstrate that the framework achieves significantly higher optimization success rates compared to baseline methods. For example, combining Qwen-2.5-Coder-7B and Deepseek-V3 achieves a 66.67\% optimization success rate for power utilization, outperforming Deepseek-V3 alone (49.81\%) and even commercial models like GPT-4o (55.81\%). Further investigation of local and cloud LLM combinations reveals that different model pairings exhibit varying strengths for specific optimization objectives, with interesting trends emerging when varying the number of comparative code pairs. Our work establishes a new paradigm for secure hardware design optimization that balances performance gains with IP protection.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2508_05675
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Principle-Guided Verilog Optimization: IP-Safe Knowledge Transfer via Local-Cloud Collaboration
Wang, Jing
Li, Zheng
Li, Lei
He, Fan
Lin, Liyu
Lai, Yao
Li, Yan
Zeng, Xiaoyang
Guo, Yufeng
Cryptography and Security
Artificial Intelligence
Recent years have witnessed growing interest in adopting large language models (LLMs) for Register Transfer Level (RTL) code optimization. While powerful cloud-based LLMs offer superior optimization capabilities, they pose unacceptable intellectual property (IP) leakage risks when processing proprietary hardware designs. In this paper, we propose a new scenario where Verilog code must be optimized for specific attributes without leaking sensitive IP information. We introduce the first IP-preserving edge-cloud collaborative framework that leverages the benefits of both paradigms. Our approach employs local small LLMs (e.g., Qwen-2.5-Coder-7B) to perform secure comparative analysis between paired high-quality target designs and novice draft codes, yielding general design principles that summarize key insights for improvements. These principles are then used to query stronger cloud LLMs (e.g., Deepseek-V3) for targeted code improvement, ensuring that only abstracted and IP-safe guidance reaches external services. Our experimental results demonstrate that the framework achieves significantly higher optimization success rates compared to baseline methods. For example, combining Qwen-2.5-Coder-7B and Deepseek-V3 achieves a 66.67\% optimization success rate for power utilization, outperforming Deepseek-V3 alone (49.81\%) and even commercial models like GPT-4o (55.81\%). Further investigation of local and cloud LLM combinations reveals that different model pairings exhibit varying strengths for specific optimization objectives, with interesting trends emerging when varying the number of comparative code pairs. Our work establishes a new paradigm for secure hardware design optimization that balances performance gains with IP protection.
title Principle-Guided Verilog Optimization: IP-Safe Knowledge Transfer via Local-Cloud Collaboration
topic Cryptography and Security
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.05675