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Zhiyao Xie

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Jul 2026

CircuitProver: Agentic Lean 4 Theorem Proving with Reusable Circuit Proof Library for Hardware Verification

Modern integrated circuits (ICs) are becoming increasingly complex, making functional verification a major bottleneck. The dominant hardware formal verification methodology, model checking, verifies each design instance separately and exposes only pass/fail results, so the reasoning behind a proof stays locked inside solver heuristics and is repeatedly reconstructed across related designs. Interactive theorem proving instead yields explicit, reusable proof artifacts, but applying it to hardware remains largely manual, demanding expert effort for formalization, invariant discovery, and proof development. In this paper, we present CircuitProver, an agentic Lean 4-based verification framework supporting proof-accumulation and parameterized verification. CircuitProver automatically translates parameterized hardware designs and their natural language specifications into executable Lean 4 models. It then iteratively constructs machine-checked proofs through Lean feedback to establish that the hardware code complies with the specification. The proving traces and verified theorems are distilled into reusable libraries, where proving strategies guide future agent reasoning and verified lemmas support formal proof reuse across related hardware verification tasks. We further introduce the first benchmark suite for evaluating agentic hardware theorem proving, covering diverse parameterized hardware designs, specifications, proof tasks, and evaluation metrics. Across 63 tasks, CircuitProver successfully proves all benchmarks, while a vanilla agent solves 92.1% of them and requires twice as many proof rounds on average. Ablation studies show that accumulated proof knowledge reduces redundant proof construction across related verification tasks, reducing proof length by 16.3% and verification time by 23.2%.

Zi-Yi Yang, Wenji Fang, Chen Chen et al. · 0 citations
Preprint Aug 2026

FABO: Agent-Guided Discovery of Joint Breakpoint Optimization for Timing-Driven Routing Trees

The topology of a routing tree determines how a multi-pin net branches and shares physical wire, directly affecting wirelength, congestion, capacitance, and delay. We study a central early-stage routing problem: minimizing wirelength while bounding the root-to-sink path stretch for every sink. SALT is the state-of-the-art constructive algorithm for this problem. We ask whether language-model-guided search can discover a constructive algorithm that improves on SALT. To make this search reliable, we develop an agent framework that combines parallel exploration with independent checking. Applied to SALT, the framework discovers a structural limitation: SALT repairs one sink path at a time and therefore never jointly decides where paths sharing root-side wire should split. This sink-local choice can split the paths too early and duplicate wire. This discovery leads to Flow-Aware Breakpoint Optimization (FABO), which jointly optimizes breakpoints across root-to-sink paths that share wire while preserving every sink's stretch budget. Across 1.29 million ICCAD15 nets and SALT's 20-point stretch-tolerance schedule, FABO reduces average FLUTE-normalized wirelength at every setting, with peak same reductions of 0.83% overall and 2.66% for nets with at least 30 pins. With 1.3x SALT's runtime, FABO-FAST identifies and optimizes most nets for which FABO provides a substantial wirelength reduction. Code is available at https://github.com/DevinShang/routing-FABO.

Shang Liu, Wenji Fang, Jing Wang et al. · 0 citations
Preprint Aug 2026

G-Power: Architecture-level GPU Power Modeling with Aggregated Knowledge Foundations from Known GPUs

Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) have been serving as critical computation resources for large-scale parallel computations. With increasing chip complexity, power efficiency has become an important design objective for modern GPUs. GPU power optimization relies on fast power evaluation, requiring architecture-level GPU power model. However, because of the time-consuming power label collection, only simple microbenchmarks are adopted for training. The limitation of microbenchmarks as training data incurs low accuracy for existing architecture-level GPU power models like AccelWattch. To address the limitation of microbenchmarks as training data, we propose G-Power, an architecture-level GPU power modeling framework that utilizes additional known GPU chips to provide additional knowledge. G-Power utilizes the aggregated knowledge foundation from additional known GPU chips and then performs fine-tuning on our target GPU. To provide foundations with additional known GPU chips and capture the similarity to utilize these foundations for fine-tuning, G-Power adopts a three-phase algorithm consisting of 1) pre-training with additional known chips, 2) attention-inspired aggregation, and 3) fine-tuning on our target GPU. We evaluate G-Power on four modern NVIDIA GPUs, demonstrating high accuracy. G-Power can achieve a low MAPE of 14% and a high correlation coefficient R of 0.88 on average, which are 22% lower MAPE and 0.36 higher R than AccelWattch.

Qijun Zhang, Yao Lu, Shang Liu et al. · 0 citations
Preprint Aug 2026

FSGen: Agile Fused and Sparse Accelerator Generator with Accurate Power Model for LLM Applications

With the growing demand of artificial intelligence (AI) applications, large language models (LLMs) have become important workloads in many domains. The question of how to efficiently generate optimal AI chip accelerator designs remains unresolved and challenging. Currently, there is a lack of end-to-end design methodologies for efficient design space exploration (DSE). We propose FSGen, an agile framework for attention-based LLM accelerator generation with an early-stage PPA estimator. FSGen supports fused operator dataflows and sparsity with a diverse design space and finds designs with 1.4x better power efficiency or 10x speedup with similar PPA metrics compared to prior work. Pareto-optimal designs have much better performance over a wide range of LLM benchmarks and have 58x better figures of merit (FoM). Design exploration is also faster due to our PPA estimators, which have better accuracy than prior art and reduce DSE runtime drastically.

J. Mok, Qi-Jun Zhang, Zhi-Yao Xie · 0 citations

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