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CTOnews.com, June 19 (Xinhua)-- generative artificial intelligence has begun to enter areas such as hardware design. Recently, a team of researchers at New York University announced that they have successfully designed and built a microprocessor using the chat robot ChatGPT.

Dr. Dr. Hammond Pearce, an assistant research professor in the Department of Electrical and computer Engineering and the Center for Cyber Security at New York University, said that their inspiration for launching the Chip Chat project was to explore the capabilities and limitations of existing generative AI large language models in hardware design. " We want to know how good these models are, "he said." A lot of people look at these models and think they're just toys. But I don't think they are toys. They are not yet popular, but they will definitely be popular, which is why we made Chip Chat-- almost like a proof-of-concept demonstration. "

The design process for creating IC using LLM CTOnews.com notes that using chat-based AI assistants can help solve a huge challenge facing the chip design industry: hardware description language (HDL). While HDL code is essential for designing microprocessors, they require very professional knowledge. "the biggest challenge with hardware description languages is that a lot of people can write them," Dr. Pierce said. "it's hard to be an expert. That means our best engineers are still doing trivial things in these languages, because there aren't that many engineers to do."

"AI can accelerate the output of engineers, allowing AI to do something easy and fast, while engineers can focus their brainpower on more difficult things." He added.

According to the team, through chat-based generative AI, engineers can design microprocessors in simple English without the need for HDL. In response, Dr. Pierce said, "I'm not an expert in chip design at all. This is the first chip I designed, and I think that's why it's so impressive."

The Chip Chat team evaluates ChatGPT's performance in chip design by following a design flowchart and evaluation criteria, using a dialogue framework to form a feedback loop.

Chip Chat design flowchart as part of the design process, the team asked ChatGPT to design its own instruction set architecture (ISA), assembler, arithmetic logic unit (ALU), opcode, optimization, and so on. It is worth noting that the first prompt to start the project is this: "Let's design a brand new microprocessor." We are severely limited in terms of space and I / O. We have to do this in 1000 standard cells of ASIC, so I think we need to limit ourselves to an accumulator-based 8-bit architecture without multi-byte instructions. With that in mind, how do you think we should start? "

After 124 messages, the team successfully designed an 8-bit accumulator-based microprocessor with the same functionality as comparable PIC products, and the chip was then sent to be manufactured on Skywater 130 nm shuttle. The team claims that the study marks the first time that an IC designed by LLM has been actually produced.

From this experiment, the team concluded that ChatGPT can indeed be used as a real-world solution to design functional chips.

According to Dr Pierce, this does not necessarily mean that AI will replace human engineers. "it doesn't mean that AI will replace engineers, because there will always be tools and jobs that these AI can't do. There are always some drawbacks to what they produce, because that's essentially the way they work."

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