LLMs for Analog Circuit Design Continuum (ACDC)
This study systematically evaluates the human-AI collaboration suitability of large language models (LLMs) in analog and custom digital circuit design (ACDC), focusing on their reliability and robustness in domain-specific reasoning, adherence to physical constraints, and structured representation tasks. Through controlled comparative experiments, we assess models—including T5, GPT-2, Mistral-7B, and GPT-oss-20B—on multimodal circuit data: netlists, natural-language descriptions, and symbolic constraints. Results show that smaller models exhibit greater robustness on constrained subtasks, whereas larger models suffer from poor generalization and frequent violations of fundamental physical laws. We introduce, for the first time, an engineering-deployment-oriented reliability evaluation framework that identifies critical limitations—including data representation sensitivity and design inconsistency—under real-world ACDC conditions. This work establishes a methodological foundation and practical guidelines for AI-assisted, high-reliability circuit design.