Architect of the Bits World: Masked Autoregressive Modeling for Circuit Generation Guided by Truth Table
This work addresses the challenge of suboptimal circuit generation in integrated circuit design, offering a scalable solution that bridges probabilistic models and precise synthesis, though it is incremental as it builds on existing differentiable architecture search methods.
The paper tackles the problem of logic synthesis for electronic design automation by proposing a novel approach that integrates conditional generative models with differentiable architecture search to generate gate-level circuits from truth tables, resulting in superior performance in minimizing power consumption and area occupancy.
Logic synthesis, a critical stage in electronic design automation (EDA), optimizes gate-level circuits to minimize power consumption and area occupancy in integrated circuits (ICs). Traditional logic synthesis tools rely on human-designed heuristics, often yielding suboptimal results. Although differentiable architecture search (DAS) has shown promise in generating circuits from truth tables, it faces challenges such as high computational complexity, convergence to local optima, and extensive hyperparameter tuning. Consequently, we propose a novel approach integrating conditional generative models with DAS for circuit generation. Our approach first introduces CircuitVQ, a circuit tokenizer trained based on our Circuit AutoEncoder We then develop CircuitAR, a masked autoregressive model leveraging CircuitVQ as the tokenizer. CircuitAR can generate preliminary circuit structures from truth tables, which guide DAS in producing functionally equivalent circuits. Notably, we observe the scalability and emergent capability in generating complex circuit structures of our CircuitAR models. Extensive experiments also show the superior performance of our method. This research bridges the gap between probabilistic generative models and precise circuit generation, offering a robust solution for logic synthesis.