Configuration Over Selection: Hyperparameter Sensitivity Exceeds Model Differences in Open-Source LLMs for RTL Generation

arXiv:2604.17102v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Benchmarking of open-source LLMs for hardware design focuses on which LLMs to use, while treating inference-time decoding configuration as a secondary concern. This work shows that it matters more how an LLM is configured than which model is selected. Benchmarking 26 open-source LLMs on VerilogEval and RTLLM with synthesis-in-the-loop evaluation, the study first maps the current capability landscape and then conducts an extensive 108-configuratio