MACO: A Multi-Agent LLM-Based Hardware/Software Co-Design Framework for CGRAs

Abstract: Coarse-grained Reconfigurable Arrays (CGRAs) are a promising computing architecture that can deliver high-performance, energy-efficient acceleration across diverse domains. By supporting reconfiguration at the functional unit level, CGRAs efficiently adapt to varying computational patterns and optimize resource utilization. However, designing CGRAs is highly challenging due to the vast design space, independent architectural parameters, and the time-consuming nature of manual design. Fortunately, the rapid advancement of LLMs presents new opportunities to automate this process. In this work, we propose MACO -- an open-source multi-agent LLM-based framework for Hardware/Software (HW/SW) co-design of CGRAs. The framework employs LLM reasoning to generate CGRAs across four stages: HW/SW co-design, Design error correction, Best design selection, and Evaluation & Feedback. Furthermore, MACO iteratively optimizes the generated CGRAs, leveraging agent reasoning and feedback to achieve higher PPA (that is, power, performance, and area) design points for a given domain. In addition, we introduce an LLM self-learning mechanism that employs LLM-driven decision making to select the optimal CGRA to accelerate the design process. We evaluate the framework with state-of-the-art LLM-based methods and manual CGRA design, in terms of performance, power consumption, and area. Experimental results show that MACO efficiently generates high-quality CGRA architectures, significantly reducing manual design effort and demonstrating the potential of our framework for real-world CGRA design.