Haocheng Ma | Searcharxiv

arXiv2024

Hardware Phi-1.5B: A Large Language Model Encodes Hardware Domain Specific Knowledge

In the rapidly evolving semiconductor industry, where research, design, verification, and manufacturing are intricately linked, the potential of Large Language Models to revolutionize hardware design and security verification is immense. The primary challenge, however, lies in the complexity of hardware specific issues that are not adequately addressed by the natural language or software code knowledge typically acquired during the pretraining stage. Additionally, the scarcity of datasets specific to the hardware domain poses a significant hurdle in developing a foundational model. Addressing these challenges, this paper introduces Hardware Phi 1.5B, an innovative large language model specifically tailored for the hardware domain of the semiconductor industry. We have developed a specialized, tiered dataset comprising small, medium, and large subsets and focused our efforts on pretraining using the medium dataset. This approach harnesses the compact yet efficient architecture of the Phi 1.5B model. The creation of this first pretrained, hardware domain specific large language model marks a significant advancement, offering improved performance in hardware design and verification tasks and illustrating a promising path forward for AI applications in the semiconductor sector.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2023

virtCCA: Virtualized Arm Confidential Compute Architecture with TrustZone

Arm introduced the Confidential Compute Architecture (CCA) in the upcoming Armv9-A architecture, enabling the support of confidential virtual machines (CVMs) in a separate world called the Realm world, providing protection from untrusted normal world. While CCA offers a promising future for confidential computing, the widespread commercial CCA hardware is not available in the near future. To fill this gap, we present virtCCA, an architecture that facilitates virtualized CCA using TrustZone, a mature hardware feature on existing Arm platforms. Notably, virtCCA can be implemented on platforms equipped with the Secure EL2 (S-EL2) extension from ARMv8.4 onwards, as well as on earlier platforms that lack S-EL2 support. virtCCA provides strong compatibility with the CCA specifications at the API level. We developed the entire CCA software and firmware stack on top of virtCCA, including the enhancements to the normal world's KVM to support CVMs, and the TrustZone Management Monitor (TMM) that enforces isolation among CVMs and provides CVM lifecycle management. We have implemented virtCCA on real Arm servers, both with and without S-EL2 support. Our evaluation on micro-benchmarks and macrobenchmarks demonstrates that the overhead of running CVMs is acceptable compared to running normal-world VMs. Specifically, in a set of real-world workloads, the overhead of virtCCA-SEL2 is less than 29.7% for I/O intensive workloads, while virtCCA-EL3 outperforms the baseline in most cases.

cs.CR↗