mlsanityData to 14 Oct 2026

AI Agents for Photonic Integrated Circuit Design Automation

arXiv 2508.14123 ↗First posted 18 Aug 2025cs.AR cs.AI physics.app-phcited by 7

On the map: LLM agents and tool use → Software engineering coding agents

Abstract (arXiv)

We present Photonics Intelligent Design and Optimization (PhIDO), a multi-agent framework that converts natural-language photonic integrated circuit (PIC) design requests into layout mask files. We compare 7 reasoning large language models for PhIDO using a testbench of 102 design descriptions that ranged from single devices to 112-component PICs. The success rate for single-device designs was up to 91%. For design queries with less than or equal to 15 components, o1, Gemini-2.5-pro, and Claude Opus 4 achieved the highest end-to-end pass@5 success rates of approximately 57%, with Gemini-2.5-pro requiring the fewest output tokens and lowest cost. The next steps toward autonomous PIC development include standardized knowledge representations, expanded datasets, extended verification, and robotic automation.

Key facts. Cited by 7 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Placed in Software engineering coding agents, one of 16 directions in LLM agents and tool use. Builds on 26 of its 58 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 18 Aug 2025.

Builds on

26 of 58 references.

Closest ancestors · 1

Same direction, newest first

  1. 2023ChatEDA: A Large Language Model Powered Autonomous Agent for EDA20 Aug

Other references · 25

  1. 2017Attention Is All You Needcited by 60,361
  2. 2020Language Models are Few-Shot Learnerscited by 32,419
  3. 2022Training language models to follow instructions with human feedbackcited by 15,971
  4. 2024The Llama 3 Herd of Modelscited by 14,715
  5. 2022Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language Modelscited by 12,459
  6. 2020Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Knowledge-Intensive NLP Taskscited by 9,297
  7. 2022ReAct: Synergizing Reasoning and Acting in Language Modelscited by 8,695
  8. 2025DeepSeek-R1: Incentivizing Reasoning Capability in LLMs via Reinforcement Learningcited by 6,330
  9. 2023Toolformer: Language Models Can Teach Themselves to Use Toolscited by 4,182
  10. 2025Gemini 2.5: Pushing the Frontier with Advanced Reasoning, Multimodality, Long Context, and Next Generation Agentic Capabilitiescited by 3,796
  11. 2023Self-Refine: Iterative Refinement with Self-Feedbackcited by 3,442
  12. 2024Gemini 1.5: Unlocking multimodal understanding across millions of tokens of contextcited by 3,224
13 more
  1. 2022Constitutional AI: Harmlessness from AI Feedbackcited by 3,050
  2. 2022Scaling Instruction-Finetuned Language Modelscited by 3,024
  3. 2022Self-Instruct: Aligning Language Models with Self-Generated Instructionscited by 2,724
  4. 2024The AI Scientist: Towards Fully Automated Open-Ended Scientific Discoverycited by 1,071
  5. 2025Accelerating scientific discovery with Co-Scientistcited by 401
  6. 2025Model Context Protocol (MCP): Landscape, Security Threats, and Future Research Directionscited by 265
  7. 2023VeriGen: A Large Language Model for Verilog Code Generationcited by 200
  8. 2023ChipNeMo: Domain-Adapted LLMs for Chip Designcited by 174
  9. 2023ChipGPT: How far are we from natural language hardware designcited by 105
  10. 2023LLM4EDA: Emerging Progress in Large Language Models for Electronic Design Automationcited by 40
  11. 2024Agents for self-driving laboratories applied to quantum computingcited by 19
  12. 2025PICBench: Benchmarking LLMs for Photonic Integrated Circuits Designcited by 5
  13. 2025Large Language Models and Attention-Based AI for Hardware Design and Security: Progress, Challenges, and Opportunitiescited by 4

Built on by

Cited by year (2026 to 14 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2025: 2; 2026: 5.

7 papers.

  1. 2025Towards autonomous quantum physics research using LLM agents with access to intelligent toolscited by 7
  2. 2025Agentic Exploration of Physics Modelscited by 6
  3. 2026Agentic AI for Scalable and Robust Optical Systems Controlcited by 2
  4. 2026Harnessing Photonics for Machine Intelligencecited by 0
  5. 2026From Pixels to PCells: A Neurosymbolic Approach to Photonic Component Creationcited by 0
  6. 2026PICopilot: An LLM-based Agentic Framework for Assisting Photonic Integrated Circuit Design via Script Generationcited by 0
  7. 2026PICasso: An AI-Enabled Design Framework for Autonomous Optimization of Silicon Photonic Devicescited by 0

Similar, not cited

Close in wording, no citation either way

  1. 2025Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning for Inverse Design in Photonic Integrated Circuits
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  3. 2026OPTIAGENT: A Physics-Driven Agentic Framework for Automated Optical Design
  4. 2026VortexChat: An agentic framework for autonomous multi-objective integrated photonic design
  5. 2025A multi-agentic framework for real-time, autonomous freeform metasurface design
  6. 2025An Agentic Framework for Autonomous Metamaterial Modeling and Inverse Design
  7. 2026HALO: A Physics-Aware LLM Agent Framework for Nanophotonic Design
  8. 2026VLM-CAD: VLM-Optimized Collaborative Agent Design Workflow for Analog Circuit Sizing