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Abstract
Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used in circuit design tasks
and have typically undergone multiple rounds of training. Both the trained
models and their associated training data are considered confidential
intellectual property (IP) and must be protected from exposure. Confidential
Computing offers a promising solution to protect data and models through
Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs). However, existing TEE implementations
are not designed to support the resource-intensive nature of LLMs efficiently.
In this work, we first present a comprehensive evaluation of the LLMs within a
TEE-enabled confidential computing environment, specifically utilizing Intel
Trust Domain Extensions (TDX). We constructed experiments on three
environments: TEE-based, CPU-only, and CPU-GPU hybrid implementations, and
evaluated their performance in terms of tokens per second.
Our first observation is that distilled models, i.e., DeepSeek, surpass other
models in performance due to their smaller parameters, making them suitable for
resource-constrained devices. Also, in the quantized models such as 4-bit
quantization (Q4) and 8-bit quantization (Q8), we observed a performance gain
of up to 3x compared to FP16 models. Our findings indicate that for fewer
parameter sets, such as DeepSeek-r1-1.5B, the TDX implementation outperforms
the CPU version in executing computations within a secure environment. We
further validate the results using a testbench designed for SoC design tasks.
These validations demonstrate the potential of efficiently deploying
lightweight LLMs on resource-constrained systems for semiconductor CAD
applications.