Stefan Abi-Karam

I am a Ph.D. student at Georgia Tech in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering under my advisor Prof. Cong (Callie) Hao as part of Sharc Lab.

In my Ph.D., I work on AI for hardware design and EDA, with a focus on FPGA and high-level synthesis (HLS) design flows. My research includes creating large-scale HLS/HDL datasets, benchmarking LLMs for hardware code generation, and integrating LLMs into HLS and FPGA design tools.

I am also a full-time research faculty at Georgia Tech through Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) within the Cybersecurity, Information, Communication, Command and Control and Software Systems (CIPHER) lab division.

My roles give me the rare distinction of being both a Ph.D. student and a research faculty member at the same time at Georgia Tech!

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[June 2, 2025] Awarded the inaugural LAD Fellowship to continue working on rapid design of domain-specific hardware accelerators using AI agents for HLS design.
[June 1, 2025] Attended the LLM-Aided Design (LAD) conference in San Francisco, CA, and presented HLS-Eval, the first comprehensive, modular, and reproducible LLM benchmark for HLS design. First conference travel with Lauren!
[March 1, 2025] Successfully passed PhD proposal presentation, planning to defend in 2026 with a major focus on agentic AI for hardware design.

[January 15, 2026] FIFOAdvisor: A DSE Framework for Automated FIFO Sizing of High-Level Synthesis Designs - ASP-DAC 2026
[June 26, 2025] HLS-Eval: A Benchmark and Framework for Evaluating LLMs on High-Level Synthesis Design Tasks - ICLAD 2025
[March 11, 2024] HLSFactory: A Framework Empowering High-Level Synthesis Datasets for Machine Learning and Beyond - MLCAD 2024

Teaching, honors and awards, and service activities.