Ask-EDA: A Design Assistant Empowered by LLM, Hybrid RAG and Abbreviation De-hallucination
This is an incremental improvement for electronic design engineers, enhancing productivity through a specialized conversational assistant.
The paper tackles the problem of electronic design engineers needing efficient access to relevant information by developing Ask-EDA, a chat agent that uses LLM, hybrid RAG, and abbreviation de-hallucination, resulting in over 40% to 70% improvements in Recall on tailored datasets.
Electronic design engineers are challenged to find relevant information efficiently for a myriad of tasks within design construction, verification and technology development. Large language models (LLM) have the potential to help improve productivity by serving as conversational agents that effectively function as subject-matter experts. In this paper we demonstrate Ask-EDA, a chat agent designed to serve as a 24x7 expert available to provide guidance to design engineers. Ask-EDA leverages LLM, hybrid retrieval augmented generation (RAG) and abbreviation de-hallucination (ADH) techniques to deliver more relevant and accurate responses. We curated three evaluation datasets, namely q2a-100, cmds-100 and abbr-100. Each dataset is tailored to assess a distinct aspect: general design question answering, design command handling and abbreviation resolution. We demonstrated that hybrid RAG offers over a 40% improvement in Recall on the q2a-100 dataset and over a 60% improvement on the cmds-100 dataset compared to not using RAG, while ADH yields over a 70% enhancement in Recall on the abbr-100 dataset. The evaluation results show that Ask-EDA can effectively respond to design-related inquiries.