  The remarkable capabilities and intricate nature of Artificial Intelligence
(AI) have dramatically escalated the imperative for specialized AI
accelerators. Nonetheless, designing these accelerators for various AI
workloads remains both labor- and time-intensive. While existing design
exploration and automation tools can partially alleviate the need for extensive
human involvement, they still demand substantial hardware expertise, posing a
barrier to non-experts and stifling AI accelerator development. Motivated by
the astonishing potential of large language models (LLMs) for generating
high-quality content in response to human language instructions, we embark on
this work to examine the possibility of harnessing LLMs to automate AI
accelerator design. Through this endeavor, we develop GPT4AIGChip, a framework
intended to democratize AI accelerator design by leveraging human natural
languages instead of domain-specific languages. Specifically, we first perform
an in-depth investigation into LLMs' limitations and capabilities for AI
accelerator design, thus aiding our understanding of our current position and
garnering insights into LLM-powered automated AI accelerator design.
Furthermore, drawing inspiration from the above insights, we develop a
framework called GPT4AIGChip, which features an automated demo-augmented
prompt-generation pipeline utilizing in-context learning to guide LLMs towards
creating high-quality AI accelerator design. To our knowledge, this work is the
first to demonstrate an effective pipeline for LLM-powered automated AI
accelerator generation. Accordingly, we anticipate that our insights and
framework can serve as a catalyst for innovations in next-generation
LLM-powered design automation tools.
