VLM-CAD: VLM-Optimized Collaborative Agent Design Workflow for Analog Circuit Sizing

arXiv:2601.07315v5 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Vision Language Models (VLMs) have demonstrated remarkable potential in multimodal reasoning. However, they can have spatial blindness and logical hallucinations when interpreting densely structured engineering content, such as analog circuit schematics. To address these challenges, we propose a Vision Language Model-Optimized Collaborative Agent Design Workflow for Analog Circuit Sizing (VLM-CAD) designed to support step-by-step reasoning over multimodal evidence. VLM-CAD bridges the modality gap by integrating a neuro-symbolic structural parsing module, Image2Net, which transforms raw pixels into explicit topological graphs and structured JSON representations to anchor VLM interpretation in deterministic facts. To ensure the reliability required for engineering decisions, we further propose ExTuRBO, an Explainable Trust Region Bayesian Optimization method. ExTuRBO employs agent-generated semantic seeds to warm-start local searches and uses Automatic Relevance Determination to provide sensitivity evidence for the final design report. Experimental results on 12 sizing tasks covering six circuits and four technology platforms show that VLM-CAD achieves a pooled Strict Pass@1 of 23.3% and a Relaxed Pass@1 of 91.7%, while providing sensitivity evidence for final design reports.