ChipNeMo (LLMs for Chip Design)

Domain adaptation pipeline: Applies continued pretraining on chip-design corpora, SFT, and domain-specific RLHF to adapt general LLMs to semiconductor design language.

Three applications: Evaluates assistant chatbot for engineers, EDA (electronic design automation) tool invocation, and bug summarization - three real internal chip-design pain points.

Significant adaptation gains: Domain adaptation dramatically outperforms general-purpose LLMs across tasks despite using smaller model sizes.

Adapted RAG: Using a domain-adapted LLM as the generator in RAG further improves answer quality compared to using a general-purpose LLM with the same retrieval stack.