AnalogRetriever: Learning Cross-Modal Representations for Analog Circuit Retrieval

arXiv cs.CV / 4/28/2026

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Key Points

  • Analog circuit IP reuse is hindered by difficulty searching across heterogeneous formats (SPICE netlists, schematics, and functional descriptions), because existing approaches mainly support exact matching within a single modality.
  • The paper introduces AnalogRetriever, a unified tri-modal retrieval framework that embeds schematics and descriptions with a vision-language model and netlists with a port-aware relational graph convolutional network into a shared space using curriculum contrastive learning.
  • A new high-quality dataset is built on Masala-CHAI using a two-stage repair pipeline that improves netlist compile rate from 22% to 100%, enabling effective training and evaluation.
  • Experiments report an average Recall@1 of 75.2% across six cross-modal retrieval directions, outperforming prior baselines.
  • When integrated into the AnalogCoder agentic framework as a retrieval-augmented generation module, AnalogRetriever improves functional pass rates and helps complete tasks that were previously unsolved, with code and the dataset planned for release.

Abstract

Analog circuit design relies heavily on reusing existing intellectual property (IP), yet searching across heterogeneous representations such as SPICE netlists, schematics, and functional descriptions remains challenging. Existing methods are largely limited to exact matching within a single modality, failing to capture cross-modal semantic relationships. To bridge this gap, we present AnalogRetriever, a unified tri-modal retrieval framework for analog circuit search. We first build a high-quality dataset on top of Masala-CHAI through a two-stage repair pipeline that raises the netlist compile rate from 22\% to 100\%. Built on this foundation, AnalogRetriever encodes schematics and descriptions with a vision-language model and netlists with a port-aware relational graph convolutional network, mapping all three modalities into a shared embedding space via curriculum contrastive learning. Experiments show that AnalogRetriever achieves an average Recall@1 of 75.2\% across all six cross-modal retrieval directions, significantly outperforming existing baselines. When integrated into the AnalogCoder agentic framework as a retrieval-augmented generation module, it consistently improves functional pass rates and enables previously unsolved tasks to be completed. Our code and dataset will be released.