Revolution or Hype? Seeking the Limits of Large Models in Hardware Design

Recent breakthroughs in Large Language Models (LLMs) and Large Circuit Models (LCMs) have sparked excitement across the electronic design automation (EDA) community, promising a revolution in circuit design and optimization. Yet, this excitement is met with significant skepticism: Are these AI models a genuine revolution in circuit design, or a temporary wave of inflated expectations? This paper serves as a foundational text for the corresponding ICCAD 2025 panel, bringing together perspectives from leading experts in academia and industry. It critically examines the practical capabilities, fundamental limitations, and future prospects of large AI models in hardware design. The paper synthesizes the core arguments surrounding reliability, scalability, and interpretability, framing the debate on whether these models can meaningfully outperform or complement traditional EDA methods. The result is an authoritative overview offering fresh insights into one of today's most contentious and impactful technology trends.

ALF -- A Fitness-Based Artificial Life Form for Evolving Large-Scale Neural Networks

Machine Learning (ML) is becoming increasingly important in daily life. In this context, Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) are a popular approach within ML methods to realize an artificial intelligence. Usually, the topology of ANNs is predetermined. However, there are problems where it is difficult to find a suitable topology. Therefore, Topology and Weight Evolving Artificial Neural Network (TWEANN) algorithms have been developed that can find ANN topologies and weights using genetic algorithms. A well-known downside for large-scale problems is that TWEANN algorithms often evolve inefficient ANNs and require long runtimes. To address this issue, we propose a new TWEANN algorithm called Artificial Life Form (ALF) with the following technical advancements: (1) speciation via structural and semantic similarity to form better candidate solutions, (2) dynamic adaptation of the observed candidate solutions for better convergence properties, and (3) integration of solution quality into genetic reproduction to increase the probability of optimization success. Experiments on large-scale ML problems confirm that these approaches allow the fast solving of these problems and lead to efficient evolved ANNs.

Pick the Right Edge Device: Towards Power and Performance Estimation of CUDA-based CNNs on GPGPUs

The emergence of Machine Learning (ML) as a powerful technique has been helping nearly all fields of business to increase operational efficiency or to develop new value propositions. Besides the challenges of deploying and maintaining ML models, picking the right edge device (e.g., GPGPUs) to run these models (e.g., CNN with the massive computational process) is one of the most pressing challenges faced by organizations today. As the cost of renting (on Cloud) or purchasing an edge device is directly connected to the cost of final products or services, choosing the most efficient device is essential. However, this decision making requires deep knowledge about performance and power consumption of the ML models running on edge devices that must be identified at the early stage of ML workflow. In this paper, we present a novel ML-based approach that provides ML engineers with the early estimation of both power consumption and performance of CUDA-based CNNs on GPGPUs. The proposed approach empowers ML engineers to pick the most efficient GPGPU for a given CNN model at the early stage of development.