# Free and Fair Hardware: A Pathway to Copyright Infringement-Free Verilog Generation using LLMs

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.06096 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.06096/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 25 of its 37 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 9 May 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 25 of 25)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [GPT-4 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08774/) (2023)
- [Evaluating Large Language Models Trained on Code](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.03374/) (2021)
- [Code Llama: Open Foundation Models for Code](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.12950/) (2023)
- [DeepSeek-Coder: When the Large Language Model Meets Programming -- The Rise of Code Intelligence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.14196/) (2024)
- [The Stack: 3 TB of permissively licensed source code](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.15533/) (2022)
- [DeepSeek-Coder-V2: Breaking the Barrier of Closed-Source Models in Code Intelligence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.11931/) (2024)
- [VeriGen: A Large Language Model for Verilog Code Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.00708/) (2023)
- [RTLLM: An Open-Source Benchmark for Design RTL Generation with Large Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.05345/) (2023)
- [Chip-Chat: Challenges and Opportunities in Conversational Hardware Design](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.13243/) (2023)
- [ChipGPT: How far are we from natural language hardware design](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14019/) (2023)
- [RTLFixer: Automatically Fixing RTL Syntax Errors with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.16543/) (2023)
- [BetterV: Controlled Verilog Generation with Discriminative Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.03375/) (2024)
- [AutoChip: Automating HDL Generation Using LLM Feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.04887/) (2023)
- [RTLCoder: Outperforming GPT-3.5 in Design RTL Generation with Our Open-Source Dataset and Lightweight Solution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.08617/) (2023)
- [OriGen:Enhancing RTL Code Generation with Code-to-Code Augmentation and Self-Reflection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.16237/) (2024)
- [Make Every Move Count: LLM-based High-Quality RTL Code Generation Using MCTS](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.03289/) (2024)
- [CraftRTL: High-quality Synthetic Data Generation for Verilog Code Models with Correct-by-Construction Non-Textual Representations and Targeted Code Repair](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.12993/) (2024)
- [LLM4EDA: Emerging Progress in Large Language Models for Electronic Design Automation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.12224/) (2023)
- [Copyright Traps for Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.09363/) (2024)
- [SHIELD: Evaluation and Defense Strategies for Copyright Compliance in LLM Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.12975/) (2024)
- [OpenLLM-RTL: Open Dataset and Benchmark for LLM-Aided Design RTL Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.15112/) (2025)
- [Digger: Detecting Copyright Content Mis-usage in Large Language Model Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.00676/) (2024)
- [Exploring Memorization and Copyright Violation in Frontier LLMs: A Study of the New York Times v. OpenAI 2023 Lawsuit](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.06370/) (2024)
- [GNN4IP: Graph Neural Network for Hardware Intellectual Property Piracy Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.09130/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [Large Language Model for Verilog Code Generation: Literature Review and the Road Ahead](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.00020/) (2025)
- [EDATracer: An Agentic Framework for Large-Scale EDA Artifact Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.04032/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Limitations in Large Language Model (LLM) capabilities for hardware design tasks, such as generating functional Verilog codes, have motivated various fine-tuning optimizations utilizing curated hardware datasets from open-source repositories. However, these datasets remain limited in size and contain minimal checks on licensing for reuse, resulting in potential copyright violations by fine-tuned LLMs. Therefore, we propose an evaluation benchmark to estimate the risk of Verilog-trained LLMs to generate copyright-protected codes. To minimize this risk, we present an open-source Verilog dataset, FreeSet, containing over 220k files, along with the automated dataset curation framework utilized to provide additional guarantees of fair-use Verilog data. We then execute an LLM fine-tuning framework consisting of continual pre-training, resulting in a fine-tuned Llama model for Verilog, FreeV. Our results indicate that FreeV demonstrates the smallest risk of copyright-infringement among prior works, with only a 3% violation rate. Furthermore, experimental results demonstrate improvements in Verilog generation functionality over its baseline model, improving VerilogEval pass@10 rates by over 10%.