CS&E PhD Student Yuebo Luo Earns Third Place at ICCAD Competition
Department of Computer Science & Engineering PhD student Yuebo Luo was part of a team that earned third place at the 2024 International Conference on Computer-Aided Design (ICCAD) Competition on Large Language Model (LLM)-Assisted Hardware Code Generation. Advised by Associate Professor Caiwen Ding, Luo’s work focuses on the co-design of algorithms and hardware for machine learning. This work was led by Carsten Portner and Cunxi Yu from University of Maryland.
The competition, sponsored by NVIDIA, aims to harness community efforts to develop an open-source, large-scale, and high-quality dataset for computer hardware code generation, igniting an ImageNet-like revolution in computer vision for chip development. Each team proposed their own method to generate, collect, and improve high-quality hardware description language (HDL) code, which was then evaluated by the organizing committee.
"The first objective of this project was to develop novel methods for generating and collecting high-quality Verilog (HDL) codes, which is used in the chip design process,” said Luo. “The second objective was to implement advanced data cleaning and labeling techniques, including systematic removal of noise, error correction, deduplication, and the addition of meaningful contextual labels. The generated datasets are expected to be well aligned with LLM training requirements.”
LLM-aided Verilog generation can have a significant impact on real-life applications by automating and streamlining the design and development of computer hardware. One typical example is rapidly prototyping for hardware development, such as in robotics, autonomous driving and medical and wearable devices.
Luo was motivated to participate in the ICCAD competition through their previous research experience in graph neural networks for chip design.
“This competition, along with my ongoing research for other conferences, demonstrates how our community can advance the field of design automation and computer-aided design,” said Luo. “It's been incredibly inspiring for my research direction. This award represents a significant recognition for our research group. We truly appreciate the leading effort from Professor Cunxi Yu’s research group at the University of Maryland. I see it as both a milestone in my research journey and a guidepost for making future contributions to the field.”
Learn more about the ICCAD competition at their website.