Papers › NetTAG: A Multimodal RTL-and-Layout-Aligned Netlist Foundation Model via Text-Attributed Graph

NetTAG: A Multimodal RTL-and-Layout-Aligned Netlist Foundation Model via Text-Attributed Graph

12 Apr 2025arXiv:2504.09260archive 2025-07-28

Wenji Fang, Wenkai Li, Shang Liu, Yao Lu, Hongce Zhang, Zhiyao Xie

Circuit representation learning has shown promise in advancing Electronic Design Automation (EDA) by capturing structural and functional circuit properties for various tasks. Existing pre-trained solutions rely on graph learning with complex functional supervision, such as truth table simulation. However, they only handle simple and-inverter graphs (AIGs), struggling to fully encode other complex gate functionalities. While large language models (LLMs) excel at functional understanding, they lack the structural awareness for flattened netlists. To advance netlist representation learning, we present NetTAG, a netlist foundation model that fuses gate semantics with graph structure, handling diverse gate types and supporting a variety of functional and physical tasks. Moving beyond existing graph-only methods, NetTAG formulates netlists as text-attributed graphs, with gates annotated by symbolic logic expressions and physical characteristics as text attributes. Its multimodal architecture combines an LLM-based text encoder for gate semantics and a graph transformer for global structure. Pre-trained with gate and graph self-supervised objectives and aligned with RTL and layout stages, NetTAG captures comprehensive circuit intrinsics. Experimental results show that NetTAG consistently outperforms each task-specific method on four largely different functional and physical tasks and surpasses state-of-the-art AIG encoders, demonstrating its versatility.

PaperPDFCode

In Syntology View this paper on Syntology: its repositories, every harvested function with whether it ran, its licence and the call to fetch it.

Open this paper in Syntology's Atlas, the map of the papers in Syntology's graph and their citations.

Code

Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.

Code Syntology ran Syntology

Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.

Tasks

Graph LearningRepresentation Learning

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.

Methods

Absolute Position EncodingsAdamAttentionBPEDense ConnectionsDropoutGraph TransformerLabel SmoothingLapEigenLaplacian PELayer NormalizationLinear LayerMulti-Head AttentionPosition-Wise Feed-Forward LayerResidual ConnectionSoftmaxTransformer

Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections