Agentic Electronic Design Automation: A Handoff Perspective

The article presents a survey on the integration of LLM-based agents in Electronic Design Automation (EDA), focusing on the concept of handoff validity across multi-stage processes. It categorizes 82 systems into Stage-Bound, Flow-Bound, and Organization-Bound classes, analyzing their handoff contracts and coordination mechanisms. The authors propose a five-layer EDA agent communication protocol (EACP) to enhance agent interaction, ensuring that transferred artifacts meet acceptance conditions and provide necessary context for downstream engineering, which is crucial for improving reliability and efficiency in EDA workflows.