Jia Xiong
Publications
MicroEvo: Knowledge-Guided LLM Sampling for Efficient Microarchitecture Design Space Exploration
Microarchitecture design space exploration suffers from expansive search spaces and expensive PPA evaluation, leaving only a small simulation budget for design decision-making. Existing methods perform blind search without considering microarchitectural dependencies and fail to learn from the iterative search effectively, leading to wasted evaluations and weak Pareto convergence. In this paper, we propose MicroEvo, a knowledge-guided framework that couples off-the-shelf LLMs with Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) for multi-objective microarchitecture optimization. MicroEvo combines LLM-driven evolutionary operators, a Pareto-aware tree policy that balances Pareto contribution and diversity, an active knowledge accumulation mechanism that extracts and reuses optimization insights, and state-aware directives that adapt the search behavior online. Experiments show that MicroEvo improves Pareto-front quality by up to 36.2% over NSGA-II and achieves 10.6x higher search efficiency, and also demonstrates strong scalability to a complex industrial-scale core. The code repository is available at: https://github.com/GEAR-SEU/MicroEvo-ICCAD-26.
ChatSVA: Bridging SVA Generation for Hardware Verification via Task-Specific LLMs
Functional verification consumes over 50% of the IC development lifecycle, where SystemVerilog Assertions (SVAs) are indispensable for formal property verification and enhanced simulation-based debugging. However, manual SVA authoring is labor-intensive and error-prone. While Large Language Models (LLMs) show promise, their direct deployment is hindered by low functional accuracy and a severe scarcity of domain-specific data. To address these challenges, we introduce ChatSVA, an end-to-end SVA generation system built upon a multi-agent framework. At its core, the AgentBridge platform enables this multi-agent approach by systematically generating high-purity datasets, overcoming the data scarcity inherent to few-shot scenarios. Evaluated on 24 RTL designs, ChatSVA achieves 98.66% syntax and 96.12% functional pass rates, generating 139.5 SVAs per design with 82.50% function coverage. This represents a 33.3 percentage point improvement in functional correctness and an over 11x enhancement in function coverage compared to the previous state-of-the-art (SOTA). ChatSVA not only sets a new SOTA in automated SVA generation but also establishes a robust framework for solving long-chain reasoning problems in few-shot, domain-specific scenarios. An online service has been publicly released at https://www.nctieda.com/CHATDV.html.