Driven by Moore's Law, the complexity and scale of modern chip design are increasing rapidly. Electronic Design Automation (EDA) has been widely applied to address the challenges encountered in the full chip design process. However, the evolution of very large-scale integrated circuits has made chip design time-consuming and resource-intensive, requiring substantial prior expert knowledge. Additionally, intermediate human control activities are crucial for seeking optimal solutions. In system design stage, circuits are usually represented with Hardware Description Language (HDL) as a textual format. Recently, Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated their capability in context understanding, logic reasoning and answer generation. Since circuit can be represented with HDL in a textual format, it is reasonable to question whether LLMs can be leveraged in the EDA field to achieve fully automated chip design and generate circuits with improved power, performance, and area (PPA). In this paper, we present a systematic study on the application of LLMs in the EDA field, categorizing it into the following cases: 1) assistant chatbot, 2) HDL and script generation, and 3) HDL verification and analysis. Additionally, we highlight the future research direction, focusing on applying LLMs in logic synthesis, physical design, multi-modal feature extraction and alignment of circuits. We collect relevant papers up-to-date in this field via the following link: https://github.com/Thinklab-SJTU/Awesome-LLM4EDA.

Unless you have been living under a rock, you have heard of this new ChatGPT assistant made by OpenAI. You might be aware of its capabilities for solving IQ tests, tackling leetcode problems or to helping people write LateX. It is an amazing resource for people to retrieve all kinds of information and solve tedious tasks, like copy-writing! Today, Frederic Besse told me that he managed to do something different. Did you know, that you can run a whole virtual machine inside of ChatGPT?

Shopping Assistant Chatbot: Chatbots are considered one of the best ways of communicating with your visitors and users. They are now being heavily used in all kinds of service-related industries, be it customer service, healthcare service, and even in financial institutions. Chatbots are very much capable of handling large flows of users without losing their accuracy. Chatbot has long been used to guide and help visitors of a site. Visitors don't have to look into various menus of the website to check for a certain item, they can directly ask about their query to a chatbot which will directly show that particular item in the chatbox or answer the FAQ if that's what they are looking for.

A few years ago when chatbots were just gaining popularity, there was a lot of talk around what a chatbot actually was. With the advent of natural language processing and various machine learning techniques, some of the more advanced conversational applications wanted to separate themselves from their competition. Many began calling themselves "virtual assistants." This implied that they were somehow bigger or more powerful than existing chatbots, or perhaps were more conversational or could cover a wider range of topics. However, we quickly discovered that the market did not care how powerful the bot was or about the underlying technology, so long as it solved the right problems.