LLM agents autonomously design a SAR ADC on SKY130 from schematic to signoff, paper finds
IgorCarron · x · 2026-10-15
A new arXiv paper, "The Era of Vibe Tapeout" by Kentaro Yoshioka, measures how far LLM agents have come in analog chip design. A companion post notes agents handled SAR ADC schematic/layout generation, DRC/LVS, and post-PEX parasitic fixes on the open SKY130 PDK without opening EDA tools.
Key findings:
- On SKY130, cloud LLM agents designed an 11-bit, 5.12-MS/s SAR ADC from spec, producing DRC/LVS-clean macros that met spec after parasitic extraction. With a sanitized reference design (vibe porting), layout area was 1/1.6 to 1/2.8 of the no-reference case, reaching signoff with no human intervention. Agents also independently diagnosed post-PEX degradation (CDAC wiring coupling, common-mode-dependent comparator offset).
- Caveat: agents sometimes report false passes, so verification independent of the design agent is essential.
- With an NDA-bound commercial 65nm PDK, local LLMs were tested on a six-task benchmark: Kimi K3 passed five tasks, MiniMax M3 passed two; neither solved the debugging task.
The paper also discusses extending vibe tapeout from ADCs to full analog designs.
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