Paper · arXiv 2311.00176
ChipNeMo: Domain-Adapted LLMs for Chip Design
Mingjie Liu, Teo Ene, Robert Kirby, Chris Cheng, Nathaniel Pinckney, Rongjian Liang, Jonah Alben, Himyanshu Anand, Sanmitra Banerjee, Ismet Bayraktaroglu, Bonita Bhaskaran, Bryan Catanzaro, Arjun Chaudhuri, Sharon Clay, Bill Dally, Laura Dang, Parikshit Deshpande, Siddhanth Dhodhi, Sameer Halepete, Eric Hill, Jiashang Hu, Sumit Jain, Brucek Khailany, Kishor Kunal, Xiaowei Li, Hao Liu, Stuart Oberman, Sujeet Omar, Sreedhar Pratty, Ambar Sarkar, Zhengjiang Shao, Hanfei Sun, Pratik P Suthar, Varun Tej, Kaizhe Xu, Haoxing Ren
Custom tokenizers, continued pretraining, supervised fine-tuning, and retrieval models improve large language models for industrial chip design tasks, including engineering assistance, EDA script generation, and bug analysis.
Abstract
ChipNeMo aims to explore the applications of large language models (LLMs) for industrial chip design. Instead of directly deploying off-the-shelf commercial or open-source LLMs, we instead adopt the following domain adaptation techniques: custom tokenizers, domain-adaptive continued pretraining, supervised fine-tuning (SFT) with domain-specific instructions, and domain-adapted retrieval models. We evaluate these methods on three selected LLM applications for chip design: an engineering assistant chatbot, EDA script generation, and bug summarization and analysis. Our results show that these domain adaptation techniques enable significant LLM performance improvements over general-purpose base models across the three evaluated applications, enabling up to 5x model size reduction with similar or better performance on a range of design tasks. Our findings also indicate that there's still room for improvement between our current results and ideal outcomes. We believe that further investigation of domain-adapted LLM approaches will help close this gap in the future.