ChiseLLM: Unleashing the Power of Reasoning LLMs for Chisel Agile
  Hardware Development
Authors: name: Bowei Wang; name: Jiaran Gao; name: Yelai Feng; name: Renzhi Chen; name: Shanshan Li; name: Lei Wang
Published: 2025-04-27 07:56:49

Abstract: The growing demand for Domain-Specific Architecture (DSA) has driven the
development of Agile Hardware Development Methodology (AHDM). Hardware
Construction Language (HCL) like Chisel offers high-level abstraction features,
making it an ideal language for HCL-Based AHDM. While Large Language Models
(LLMs) excel in code generation tasks, they still face challenges with Chisel
generation, particularly regarding syntax correctness and design variability.
Recent reasoning models have significantly enhanced code generation
capabilities through test-time scaling techniques. However, we found that
reasoning models without domain adaptation cannot bring substantial benefits to
Chisel code generation tasks. This paper presents ChiseLLM, a solution
comprising data processing and transformation, prompt-guided reasoning trace
synthesis, and domain-adapted model training. We constructed high-quality
datasets from public RTL code resources and guided the model to adopt
structured thinking patterns through prompt enhancement methods. Experiments
demonstrate that our ChiseLLM-7B and ChiseLLM-32B models improved syntax
correctness by 18.85% and 26.32% respectively over base models, while
increasing variability design ability by 47.58% compared to baseline reasoning
models. Our datasets and models are publicly available, providing
high-performance, cost-effective models for HCL-Based AHDM, and offering an
effective baseline for future research. Github repository:
https://github.com/observerw/ChiseLLM