VFocus: Better Verilog Generation from Large Language Model via Focused Reasoning

Abstract: LLMs have shown impressive potential in generating Verilog codes, but ensuring functional correctness remains a challenge. Existing approaches often rely on self-consistency or simulation feedback to select the best candidate, but they miss opportunities to focus LLM reasoning on the most informative parts of the design. We propose VFocus, a three-stage framework that enhances Verilog generation by sharpening the focus of LLM reasoning onto critical decision points in the code generation process. In the \textbf{pre-ranking stage}, VFocus generates multiple code candidates through LLM prompting, retries for syntactically valid outputs, and introduces a \textit{Density-guided Filtering} to retain candidates that fall within the "reasoning sweet spot" for functional correctness. In the \textbf{ranking stage}, we simulate each code candidate using an automatically generated testbench and apply self-consistency-based clustering to identify the most consistent outputs. Finally, in the \textbf{post-ranking refinement stage}, VFocus performs inconsistency mining on top-ranked candidates and invokes reasoning-augmented LLM prompts for candidate refinement. Experiments on the VerilogEval-Human benchmark show that VFocus significantly improves the pass@1 correctness across multiple reasoning LLMs, demonstrating its effectiveness in enhancing Verilog generation for complex hardware design tasks.