2nd IEEE International Conference on LLM-Aided Design (LAD 2026)

The 2026 IEEE International Conference on LLM-Aided Design (LAD) will focus on how to use LLM (Large Language Model) technology to help design circuits, software, and computing systems with improved quality, productivity, robustness, and cost. It is the first international conference dedicated to this topic, aiming to showcase results that leverage generative-AI advances and provide methods and solutions for design automation, software development, and other fields. The conference will host leading researchers, present open-source LLM models, datasets, tool flows, and offer benchmarking, testing, and validation methods.

Topics of Interest
The main theme of LAD this year will revolve around agentic optimization and scaling inference-time methods, but we welcome a broad range of topics on new methodologies, tools, datasets, and benchmarks pertaining to:

• Agentic workflows for design automation and optimization
• LLM inference-time techniques for design 
• LLM-aided HW/SW design, code generation, and test plan generation
• System-level design methodology development with LLMs
• Finetuning of large foundation models for specialization in design automation
• New datasets and benchmarks of relevance to LLM-aided design
• Evaluation and verification of LLM-aided designs
• LLM-aided design for software development, IT automation, site reliability, and regulatory compliance. 
• LLMs for EDA, including RTL, HLS, physical design, and EDA scripting
• LLMs for reasoning and logic used in design process 
• Computational efficiency of LLM-aided design tools
• Data science and data analytics for LLM-aided design
• Security of LLM-generated designs
• Privacy, copyright, and other regulatory concerns around LLM-aided design
• LLM-aided bug-fixing
• LLM-aided design for various application domains, such as 3D manufacturing, material or drug discovery, sustainability, cybersecurity, etc. 
• LLM-aided design for emerging technologies, such as quantum computing, neuromorphic computing, and electro-optic co-design

Important Dates
Abstract Submission:    Mar 2nd, 2026 (AoE)
Notif. of Acceptance:   May 12th, 2026 (AoE)
Full Paper Submission: Mar 9th, 2026 (AoE)
Camera ready paper:  Jun 6th, 2026    (AoE)

See the conference website (https://iclad.ai/) for submission instructions.

Organizers
General Chairs: Azaliza Mirhosseini (Stanford), Yong Liu (Cadence)
Program Chairs: JV Rajendran (TAMU), Cong Hao (GaTech), Jimmy Cheng (Synopsys)