# LAAFD: LLM-based Agents for Accelerated FPGA Design

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.06085 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.06085/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 4 Feb 2026.

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [HLSmith: An Expert-Guided Agentic Framework for C/C++-to-HLS Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.06791/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

FPGAs offer high performance, low latency, and energy efficiency for accelerated computing, yet adoption in scientific and edge settings is limited by the specialized hardware expertise required. High-level synthesis (HLS) boosts productivity over HDLs, but competitive designs still demand hardware-aware optimizations and careful dataflow design. We introduce LAAFD, an agentic workflow that uses large language models to translate general-purpose C++ into optimized Vitis HLS kernels. LAAFD automates key transfor mations: deep pipelining, vectorization, and dataflow partitioning and closes the loop with HLS co-simulation and synthesis feedback to verify correctness while iteratively improving execution time in cycles. Over a suite of 15 kernels representing common compute patterns in HPC, LAFFD achieves 99.9% geomean performance when compared to the hand tuned baseline for Vitis HLS. For stencil workloads, LAAFD matches the performance of SODA, a state-of-the-art DSL-based HLS code generator for stencil solvers, while yielding more readable kernels. These results suggest LAAFD substantially lowers the expertise barrier to FPGA acceleration without sacrificing efficiency.