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TACS-RF: Tool-driven Agentic Circuit Synthesis of RF and mmWave Modules

Summary

TACS-RF lets an LLM coding agent (Claude Opus 4.8) drive industrial EDA tools such as Cadence Virtuoso/Spectre, Calibre, Cadence EMX and Ansys HFSS to semi-autonomously design a 240–251 GHz sub-THz transmitter in 90 nm SiGe BiCMOS, achieving +5.1 to +6.3 dBm output over an 11 GHz tuning range at 361 mW DC power, and discusses the human-agent division of labor toward a text-to-ASIC future.

SourcearXiv AIAuthor: Tristan Liang, Aravind Nagulu
TACS-RF: Tool-driven Agentic Circuit Synthesis of RF and mmWave Modules
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[Submitted on 22 Oct 2026]

Title:TACS-RF: Tool-driven Agentic Circuit Synthesis of RF and mmWave Modules

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Abstract:We present the framework of TACS-RF - a Tool-driven Agentic Circuit Synthesis of RF and mmWave modules. In this framework, a large-language-model (LLM) coding agent (Claude Opus 4.8) directly drives industry-standard electronic-design-automation (EDA) tools such as Cadence Virtuoso/Spectre, Calibre, Cadence EMX, and Ansys HFSS to design RF and mmWave modules. We validate the framework through the agentic design of a 240-251 GHz sub-THz transmitter in a 90 nm SiGe BiCMOS process. The agent semi-autonomously designed the sub-blocks including a 60 GHz push-push Colpitts VCO with second-harmonic extraction, multistage differential cascode power drivers, a push-push frequency doubler, a differential bowtie antenna, and all the interstage matching networks. The transmitter chain with parasitic-extracted devices and EM-verified passives delivers +5.1 to +6.3 dBm across an 11 GHz varactor-only tuning range, phase noise of -80 to -88 dBc/Hz at 1 MHz offset while consuming a DC power of 361 mW. We describe the agent-driven design flow and the resulting division of labor between human and agent, taking a step toward a "text-to-ASIC" future for designing RF/mmWave hardware.

Comments: Accepted for presentation at the 2027 IEEE Radio and Wireless Week (RWW), Silicon Monolithic Integrated Circuits in RF Systems (SiRF)

Subjects:

Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI)

Cite as: arXiv:2610.31882 [cs.AI]

(or arXiv:2610.31882v1 [cs.AI] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2610.31882

arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

Submission history

From: Tristan Liang [view email] [v1] Thu, 22 Oct 2026 20:23:05 UTC (3,664 KB)

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Key points and analysis

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Key points

  • An LLM coding agent directly operates industry-standard EDA tools including Virtuoso/Spectre, Calibre, EMX and HFSS.
  • The agent semi-autonomously designed a 240–251 GHz transmitter in 90 nm SiGe BiCMOS, including a push-push Colpitts VCO, cascode drivers, a frequency doubler, a bowtie antenna and matching networks.
  • Verified results: +5.1 to +6.3 dBm across an 11 GHz varactor-only tuning range, -80 to -88 dBc/Hz phase noise at 1 MHz offset, and 361 mW DC power.
  • The paper describes the agent-driven flow and human-agent division of labor as a step toward text-to-ASIC RF/mmWave hardware design.

Highlights and analysis are generated automatically and may contain errors. Check the original source.