# AI Agents for Photonic Integrated Circuit Design Automation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.14123 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.14123/

## 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.

## Placed in

- LLM agents and tool use / [Software engineering coding agents](https://mlsanity.com/agents/software-engineering-coding-agents/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 26 of 26)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [Training language models to follow instructions with human feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02155/) (2022)
- [The Llama 3 Herd of Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.21783/) (2024)
- [Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.11903/) (2022)
- [Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Knowledge-Intensive NLP Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.11401/) (2020)
- [ReAct: Synergizing Reasoning and Acting in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.03629/) (2022)
- [DeepSeek-R1: Incentivizing Reasoning Capability in LLMs via Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.12948/) (2025)
- [Toolformer: Language Models Can Teach Themselves to Use Tools](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.04761/) (2023)
- [Gemini 2.5: Pushing the Frontier with Advanced Reasoning, Multimodality, Long Context, and Next Generation Agentic Capabilities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.06261/) (2025)
- [Self-Refine: Iterative Refinement with Self-Feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.17651/) (2023)
- [Gemini 1.5: Unlocking multimodal understanding across millions of tokens of context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.05530/) (2024)
- [Constitutional AI: Harmlessness from AI Feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.08073/) (2022)
- [Scaling Instruction-Finetuned Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.11416/) (2022)
- [Self-Instruct: Aligning Language Models with Self-Generated Instructions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.10560/) (2022)
- [The AI Scientist: Towards Fully Automated Open-Ended Scientific Discovery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.06292/) (2024)
- [Accelerating scientific discovery with Co-Scientist](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.18864/) (2025)
- [Model Context Protocol (MCP): Landscape, Security Threats, and Future Research Directions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.23278/) (2025)
- [VeriGen: A Large Language Model for Verilog Code Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.00708/) (2023)
- [ChipNeMo: Domain-Adapted LLMs for Chip Design](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.00176/) (2023)
- [ChatEDA: A Large Language Model Powered Autonomous Agent for EDA](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.10204/) (2023)
- [ChipGPT: How far are we from natural language hardware design](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14019/) (2023)
- [LLM4EDA: Emerging Progress in Large Language Models for Electronic Design Automation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.12224/) (2023)
- [Agents for self-driving laboratories applied to quantum computing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.07978/) (2024)
- [PICBench: Benchmarking LLMs for Photonic Integrated Circuits Design](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.03159/) (2025)
- [Large Language Models and Attention-Based AI for Hardware Design and Security: Progress, Challenges, and Opportunities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.08854/) (2025)

## Built on by (most cited first, 7 of 7)

- [Towards autonomous quantum physics research using LLM agents with access to intelligent tools](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.11752/) (2025)
- [Agentic Exploration of Physics Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.24978/) (2025)
- [Agentic AI for Scalable and Robust Optical Systems Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.20144/) (2026)
- [Harnessing Photonics for Machine Intelligence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.10841/) (2026)
- [From Pixels to PCells: A Neurosymbolic Approach to Photonic Component Creation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.00084/) (2026)
- [PICopilot: An LLM-based Agentic Framework for Assisting Photonic Integrated Circuit Design via Script Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.01791/) (2026)
- [PICasso: An AI-Enabled Design Framework for Autonomous Optimization of Silicon Photonic Devices](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.26113/) (2026)

## 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.