{"title":"GenPolar: Generative AI-Aided Complexity Reduction for Polar SCL Decoding","authors":"Yutai Sun;Jingyi Chen;Yuqing Ren;Houren Ji;Yongming Huang;Xiaohu You;Chuan Zhang","doi":"10.1109/JETCAS.2025.3561330","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/JETCAS.2025.3561330","url":null,"abstract":"The CRC-aided successive cancellation list (CA-SCL) decoding algorithm for polar codes has gained widespread adoption thanks to its outstanding performance. However, with the evolution of 6G technologies, the high complexity of CA-SCL decoding poses a challenge in meeting growing performance requirements. Consequently, it is crucial to devise strategies that reduce this complexity without compromising error rates. Current efforts to mitigate the complexity mainly depend on harnessing <monospace>special nodes</monospace> associated with the code construction sequences, such as Fast-SCL decoding. However, these strategies suffer from redundant complexity due to ill-suited construction sequences and unnecessary sorting operations within special nodes. Addressing this issue, this paper proposes a hardware-friendly and GenAI-aided complexity reduction approach for Fast-SCL decoding, named GenPolar. This approach involves two-step optimization techniques: 1) <italic>Transformer encoder models</i> for generating polar construction sequences, and 2) <italic>a sorting entropy based method</i> for sorting reduction. These two-step techniques result in reduced complexity with negligible performance loss. For polar codes of length-1024 with code rates of 0.25, 0.50, and 0.75, GenPolar achieves latency reductions of 20.6%, 29.8%, and 40.6%, respectively. Even benchmarking against the reduced-complexity version of Fast-SCL decoding, the relative gains are 14.0%, 17.8%, and 22.3%, respectively. It should be noted that the immediate application is not limited to Fast-SCL decoding but also extends to other node-based SCL decoding algorithms like SSCL-SPC and SR-SCL.","PeriodicalId":48827,"journal":{"name":"IEEE Journal on Emerging and Selected Topics in Circuits and Systems","volume":"15 2","pages":"312-324"},"PeriodicalIF":3.7,"publicationDate":"2025-03-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=11007206","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144481828","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"工程技术","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Christian Herglotz;Daniel Palomino;Olivier Le Meur;C.-C. Jay Kuo
{"title":"Editorial on Circuits and Systems for Green Video Communications","authors":"Christian Herglotz;Daniel Palomino;Olivier Le Meur;C.-C. Jay Kuo","doi":"10.1109/JETCAS.2025.3541767","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/JETCAS.2025.3541767","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":48827,"journal":{"name":"IEEE Journal on Emerging and Selected Topics in Circuits and Systems","volume":"15 1","pages":"1-3"},"PeriodicalIF":3.7,"publicationDate":"2025-03-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=10924431","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143602037","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"工程技术","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"IEEE Journal on Emerging and Selected Topics in Circuits and Systems Information for Authors","authors":"","doi":"10.1109/JETCAS.2025.3538141","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/JETCAS.2025.3538141","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":48827,"journal":{"name":"IEEE Journal on Emerging and Selected Topics in Circuits and Systems","volume":"15 1","pages":"143-143"},"PeriodicalIF":3.7,"publicationDate":"2025-03-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=10924454","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143602041","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"工程技术","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"IEEE Journal on Emerging and Selected Topics in Circuits and Systems Publication Information","authors":"","doi":"10.1109/JETCAS.2025.3538139","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/JETCAS.2025.3538139","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":48827,"journal":{"name":"IEEE Journal on Emerging and Selected Topics in Circuits and Systems","volume":"15 1","pages":"C2-C2"},"PeriodicalIF":3.7,"publicationDate":"2025-03-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=10924430","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143601978","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"工程技术","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"IEEE Journal on Emerging and Selected Topics in Circuits and Systems","authors":"","doi":"10.1109/JETCAS.2025.3538143","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/JETCAS.2025.3538143","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":48827,"journal":{"name":"IEEE Journal on Emerging and Selected Topics in Circuits and Systems","volume":"15 1","pages":"C3-C3"},"PeriodicalIF":3.7,"publicationDate":"2025-03-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=10924450","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143602010","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"工程技术","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"LLM4Netlist: LLM-Enabled Step-Based Netlist Generation From Natural Language Description","authors":"Kailiang Ye;Qingyu Yang;Zheng Lu;Heng Yu;Tianxiang Cui;Ruibin Bai;Linlin Shen","doi":"10.1109/JETCAS.2025.3568548","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/JETCAS.2025.3568548","url":null,"abstract":"Empowered by Large Language Models (LLMs), substantial progress has been made in enhancing the EDA design flow in terms of high-level synthesis, such as direct translation from high-level language into RTL description. On the other hand, little research has been done for logic synthesis on the netlist generation. A direct application of LLMs for netlist generation presents additional challenges due to the scarcity of netlist-specific data, the need for tailored fine-tuning, and effective generation methods. This work first presents a novel training set and two evaluation sets catered for direct netlist generation LLMs, and an effective dataset construction pipeline to construct these datasets. Then this work proposes <sc>LLM4Netlist</small>, a novel step-based netlist generation framework via fine-tuned LLM. The framework consists of a step-based prompt construction module, a fine-tuned LLM, a code confidence estimator, and a feedback loop module, and is able to generate netlist codes directly from natural language functional descriptions. We evaluate the efficacy of our approach with our novel evaluation datasets. The experimental results demonstrate that, compared to the average score of the 10 commercial LLMs listed in our experiments, our method shows a functional correctness increase of 183.41% on the NetlistEval dataset and a 91.07% increase on NGen. The training and testing data, along with the processing code, can be found at <uri>https://github.com/klyebit/LLM4Netlist.git</uri>","PeriodicalId":48827,"journal":{"name":"IEEE Journal on Emerging and Selected Topics in Circuits and Systems","volume":"15 2","pages":"337-348"},"PeriodicalIF":3.7,"publicationDate":"2025-03-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144481942","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"工程技术","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"GPTAC: Domain-Specific Generative Pre-Trained Model for Approximate Circuit Design Exploration","authors":"Sipei Yi;Weichuan Zuo;Hongyi Wu;Ruicheng Dai;Weikang Qian;Jienan Chen","doi":"10.1109/JETCAS.2025.3568606","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/JETCAS.2025.3568606","url":null,"abstract":"Automatically designing fast and low-cost digital circuits is challenging because of the discrete nature of circuits and the enormous design space, particularly in the exploration of approximate circuits. However, recent advances in generative artificial intelligence (GAI) have shed light to address these challenges. In this work, we present GPTAC, a domain-specific generative pre-trained (GPT) model customized for designing approximate circuits. By specifying the desired circuit accuracy or area, GPTAC can automatically generate an approximate circuit using its generative capabilities. We represent circuits using domain-specific language tokens, refined through a hardware description language keyword filter applied to gate-level code. This representation enables GPTAC to effectively learn approximate circuits from existing datasets by leveraging the GPT language model, as the training data can be directly derived from gate-level code. Additionally, by focusing on a domain-specific language, only a limited set of keywords is maintained, facilitating faster model convergence. To improve the success rate of the generated circuits, we introduce a circuit check rule that masks the GPTAC inference results when necessary. The experiment indicated that GPTAC is capable of producing approximate multipliers in under 15 seconds while utilizing merely 4GB of GPU memory, achieving a 10-40% reduction in area relative to the accuracy multiplier depending on various accuracy needs.","PeriodicalId":48827,"journal":{"name":"IEEE Journal on Emerging and Selected Topics in Circuits and Systems","volume":"15 2","pages":"349-360"},"PeriodicalIF":3.7,"publicationDate":"2025-03-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144481850","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"工程技术","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"End-to-End Acceleration of Generative Models With Runtime Regularized KV Cache Management","authors":"Ashkan Moradifirouzabadi;Mingu Kang","doi":"10.1109/JETCAS.2025.3568716","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/JETCAS.2025.3568716","url":null,"abstract":"Despite their remarkable success in achieving high performance, Transformer-based models impose substantial computational and memory bandwidth requirements, posing significant challenges for hardware deployment. A key contributor to these challenges is the large KV cache, which increases data movement costs in addition to the model parameters. While various token pruning techniques have been proposed to reduce the computational complexity and storage requirements of the attention mechanism by eliminating redundant tokens, these methods often introduce irregularities in the sparsity patterns that complicate hardware implementation. To address these challenges, we propose a hardware and algorithm co-design approach. Our solution features a Runtime Cache Eviction (RCE) algorithm that removes the least relevant tokens and replaces them with newly generated ones, maintaining a constant KV cache size across blocks and inputs. To support this algorithm, we design an accelerator equipped with a KV Memory Management Unit (KV-MMU), which efficiently manages active tokens through eviction and replacement, thereby optimizing DRAM storage and access. Additionally, our design integrates batch processing and an optimized processing pipeline to improve end-to-end throughput, effectively meeting the requirements of both pre-filling and generation stages. The proposed system achieves up to <inline-formula> <tex-math>$8times $ </tex-math></inline-formula> KV cache size reduction with minimal accuracy degradation. In a 65 nm process, the proposed accelerator demonstrates <inline-formula> <tex-math>$1.52times $ </tex-math></inline-formula> energy savings and <inline-formula> <tex-math>$3.62times $ </tex-math></inline-formula> delay reductions when processing a batch size of 16, with only a 1.11% energy overhead attributed to the specialized KV-MMU.","PeriodicalId":48827,"journal":{"name":"IEEE Journal on Emerging and Selected Topics in Circuits and Systems","volume":"15 2","pages":"217-230"},"PeriodicalIF":3.7,"publicationDate":"2025-03-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144481825","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"工程技术","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Gaoche Zhang;Dingyang Zou;Kairui Sun;Zhihuan Chen;Meiqi Wang;Zhongfeng Wang
{"title":"GEMMV: An LLM-Based Automated Performance-Aware Framework for GEMM Verilog Generation","authors":"Gaoche Zhang;Dingyang Zou;Kairui Sun;Zhihuan Chen;Meiqi Wang;Zhongfeng Wang","doi":"10.1109/JETCAS.2025.3568712","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/JETCAS.2025.3568712","url":null,"abstract":"Recent advancements in artificial intelligence (AI) models have intensified the need for specialized AI accelerators. The design of optimized general matrix multiplication (GEMM) module tailored for these accelerators is crucial but time-consuming and expertise-demanding, creating a demand for automating design processes. Large language models (LLMs), capable of generating high-quality designs from human instructions, show great promise in automating GEMM module creation. However, the GEMM module’s vast design space and stringent performance requirements, along with the limitations of datasets and the lack of hardware performance awareness of LLMs, have made previous LLM-based register transfer level (RTL) code generation efforts unsuitable for GEMM design. To tackle these challenges, this paper proposes an automated performance-aware LLM-based framework, GEMMV, for generating high-correctness and high-performance Verilog code for GEMM. This framework utilizes in-context learning based on GPT-4 to automatically generate high-quality and well-annotated Verilog code for different variants of the GEMM. Additionally, it leverages in-context learning to obtain performance awareness by integrating a multi-level performance model (MLPM) with fine-tuned LLMs. The Verilog code generated by this framework reduces latency by 3.1x and improves syntax correctness by 65% and functionality correctness by 70% compared to earlier efforts.","PeriodicalId":48827,"journal":{"name":"IEEE Journal on Emerging and Selected Topics in Circuits and Systems","volume":"15 2","pages":"325-336"},"PeriodicalIF":3.7,"publicationDate":"2025-03-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144481851","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"工程技术","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"A Scalable and Energy-Efficient Processing-in-Memory Architecture for Gen-AI","authors":"Gian Singh;Sarma Vrudhula","doi":"10.1109/JETCAS.2025.3566929","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/JETCAS.2025.3566929","url":null,"abstract":"Large language models (LLMs) have achieved high accuracy in diverse NLP and computer vision tasks due to self-attention mechanisms relying on GEMM and GEMV operations. However, scaling LLMs poses significant computational and energy challenges, particularly for traditional Von-Neumann architectures (CPUs/GPUs), which incur high latency and energy consumption from frequent data movement. These issues are even more pronounced in energy-constrained edge environments. While DRAM-based near-memory architectures offer improved energy efficiency and throughput, their processing elements are limited by strict area, power, and timing constraints. This work introduces CIDAN-3D, a novel Processing-in-Memory (PIM) architecture tailored for LLMs. It features an ultra-low-power Neuron Processing Element (NPE) with high compute density (#Operations/Area), enabling efficient in-situ execution of LLM operations by leveraging high parallelism within DRAM. CIDAN-3D reduces data movement, improves locality, and achieves substantial gains in performance and energy efficiency—showing up to <inline-formula> <tex-math>$1.3times $ </tex-math></inline-formula> higher throughput and <inline-formula> <tex-math>$21.9times $ </tex-math></inline-formula> better energy efficiency for smaller models, and <inline-formula> <tex-math>$3times $ </tex-math></inline-formula> throughput and <inline-formula> <tex-math>$71times $ </tex-math></inline-formula> energy improvement for large decoder-only models compared to prior near-memory designs. As a result, CIDAN-3D offers a scalable, energy-efficient platform for LLM-driven Gen-AI applications.","PeriodicalId":48827,"journal":{"name":"IEEE Journal on Emerging and Selected Topics in Circuits and Systems","volume":"15 2","pages":"285-298"},"PeriodicalIF":3.7,"publicationDate":"2025-03-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144481870","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"工程技术","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}