Goto

Collaborating Authors

 policy-gradient placement


The Policy-gradient Placement and Generative Routing Neural Networks for Chip Design

Neural Information Processing Systems

Placement and routing are two critical yet time-consuming steps of chip design in modern VLSI systems. Distinct from traditional heuristic solvers, this paper on one hand proposes an RL-based model for mixed-size macro placement, which differs from existing learning-based placers that often consider the macro by coarse grid-based mask. While the standard cells are placed via gradient-based GPU acceleration. On the other hand, a one-shot conditional generative routing model, which is composed of a special-designed input-size-adapting generator and a bi-discriminator, is devised to perform one-shot routing to the pins within each net, and the order of nets to route is adaptively learned. Combining these techniques, we develop a flexible and efficient neural pipeline, which to our best knowledge, is the first joint placement and routing network without involving any traditional heuristic solver.