Revisiting VerilogEval: Newer LLMs, In-Context Learning, and Specification-to-RTL Tasks
<|reference_start|>Revisiting VerilogEval: Newer LLMs, In-Context Learning, and Specification-to-RTL Tasks: The application of large-language models (LLMs) to digital hardware code generation is an emerging field. Most LLMs are primarily trained on natural language and software code. Hardware code, such as Verilog, represents only a small portion of the training data and few hardware benchmarks exist. To address this gap, the open-source VerilogEval benchmark was released in 2023, providing a consistent evaluation framework for LLMs on code completion tasks. It was tested on state-of-the-art models at the time including GPT-4. However, VerilogEval and other Verilog generation benchmarks lack failure analysis and, in present form, are not conducive to exploring prompting techniques. Also, since VerilogEval's release, both commercial and open-source models have seen continued development.   In this work, we evaluate new commercial and open-source models of varying sizes against an improved VerilogEval benchmark suite. We enhance VerilogEval's infrastructure and dataset by automatically classifying failures, introduce new prompts for supporting in-context learning (ICL) examples, and extend the supported tasks to specification-to-RTL translation. We find a measurable improvement in commercial state-of-the-art models, with GPT-4 Turbo achieving a 59% pass rate on spec-to-RTL tasks. We also study the performance of open-source and domain-specific models that have emerged, and demonstrate that models can benefit substantially from ICL. We find that recently-released Llama 3.1 405B achieves a pass rate of 58%, effectively matching that of GPT-4 Turbo, and that the much smaller domain-specific RTL-Coder 6.7B models achieve an impressive 37% pass rate. However, prompt engineering is key to achieving good pass rates, and varies widely with model and task. A benchmark infrastructure that allows for prompt engineering and failure analysis is key to continued model development and deployment.<|reference_end|>
@article{pinckney2024revisiting,
    title={Revisiting VerilogEval: Newer LLMs, In-Context Learning, and
  Specification-to-RTL Tasks},
    author={Nathaniel Pinckney, Christopher Batten, Mingjie Liu, Haoxing Ren, and
  Brucek Khailany},
    journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2408.11053},
    year={2024},
    archivePrefix={arXiv},
    eprint={2408.11053},
    primaryClass={cs.AR cs.AI}
}