PDAGENT-BENCH: Characterizing, Grounding, and Architecting LLM/VLM Agents for VLSI Physical Design

Mon, 15 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

TL;DR

PDAGENT-BENCH is the first comprehensive, multi-dimensional benchmark for evaluating LLM/VLM-based agents across the VLSI physical design stack. Frontier models handle the concepts well but stumble badly when they have to actually drive EDA tools.

Key contributions:

353 curated problems spanning the physical design stack, combining conceptual questions with real-world industrial artifacts, each with expert-validated references and executable solutions.
A systematic evaluation of 11 frontier LLMs/VLMs, revealing a substantial gap between conceptual understanding and tool-grounded execution — e.g. only 42.2% on Innovus script generation.
An agentic workflow framework that improves performance through human-skill integration.
Open-source release with process design kits and EDA tools for standardized, reproducible evaluation.

BibTeX

@misc{li2026pdagentbench,
 title={PDAGENT-BENCH: Characterizing, Grounding, and Architecting LLM/VLM Agents for VLSI Physical Design},
 author={Qiufeng Li and Rongqian Chen and Quan Cheng and Chengxuan Wang and Sizhe Tang and Chia-Tung Ho and David Z. Pan and Tian Lan and Weidong Cao},
 year={2026},
 eprint={2606.17253},
 archivePrefix={arXiv},
 url={https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.17253},
}

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PDAGENT-BENCH: Characterizing, Grounding, and Architecting LLM/VLM Agents for VLSI Physical Design

TL;DR

BibTeX