  The automatic generation of RTL code (e.g., Verilog) using natural language
instructions and large language models (LLMs) has attracted significant
research interest recently. However, most existing approaches heavily rely on
commercial LLMs such as ChatGPT, while open-source LLMs tailored for this
specific design generation task exhibit notably inferior performance. The
absence of high-quality open-source solutions restricts the flexibility and
data privacy of this emerging technique. In this study, we present a new
customized LLM solution with a modest parameter count of only 7B, achieving
better performance than GPT-3.5 on two representative benchmarks for RTL code
generation. This remarkable balance between accuracy and efficiency is made
possible by leveraging our new RTL code dataset and a customized LLM algorithm,
both of which will be made fully open-source. Furthermore, we have successfully
quantized our LLM to 4-bit with a total size of 4GB, enabling it to function on
a single laptop with only slight performance degradation. This efficiency
allows the RTL generator to serve as a local assistant for engineers, ensuring
all design privacy concerns are addressed.
