The development of architecture specifications is an initial and fundamental stage of the integrated circuit (IC) design process. Traditionally, architecture specifications are crafted by experienced chip architects, a process that is not only time-consuming but also error-prone. Mistakes in these specifications may significantly affect subsequent stages of chip design. Despite the presence of advanced electronic design automation (EDA) tools, effective solutions to these specification-related challenges remain scarce. Since writing architecture specifications is naturally a natural language processing (NLP) task, this paper pioneers the automation of architecture specification development with the advanced capabilities of large language models (LLMs). Leveraging our definition and dataset, we explore the application of LLMs in two key aspects of architecture specification development: (1) Generating architecture specifications, which includes both writing specifications from scratch and converting RTL code into detailed specifications. (2) Reviewing existing architecture specifications. We got promising results indicating that LLMs may revolutionize how these critical specification documents are developed in IC design nowadays. By reducing the effort required, LLMs open up new possibilities for efficiency and accuracy in this crucial aspect of chip design.

翻译：架构规格制定是集成电路设计流程中初始且基础的阶段。传统上，架构规格由经验丰富的芯片架构师手工完成，这一过程不仅耗时且易出错。规格中的错误可能对后续芯片设计阶段产生显著影响。尽管存在先进的电子设计自动化工具，针对这些规格相关挑战的有效解决方案仍然稀缺。由于架构规格撰写本质上是一项自然语言处理任务，本文率先利用大语言模型的先进能力，实现架构规格开发的自动化。基于我们定义的数据集，本文从两个关键方面探索了大语言模型在架构规格开发中的应用：（1）生成架构规格，包括从零编写规格以及将RTL代码转换为详细规格；（2）审查现有架构规格。我们获得了令人鼓舞的结果，表明大语言模型可能彻底改变当前集成电路设计中这些关键规格文档的开发方式。通过降低所需工作量，大语言模型为芯片设计这一关键环节的效率和准确性开辟了新的可能性。