Nvidia has developed PrefixRL, an approach based on reinforcement learning (RL) to designing parallel-prefix circuits that are smaller and faster than those designed by state-of-the-art electronic-design-automation (EDA) tools. Various important circuits in the GPU such as adders, incrementors, and encoders are called parallel-prefix circuits. These circuits are fundamental to high-performance digital design and can be defined at a higher level as prefix graphs. PrefixRL is focused on this class of arithmetic circuits and the main goal of this approach is to understand if an AI agent could design a good prefix graph, considering that the state-space of the problem is O(2 n n) and cannot be resolved using brute-force methods. The desirable circuit should be small, fast and consume less power.

Chip design is as much of an art as it is an engineering feat. With all of the possible layouts of logic and memory blocks and the wires linking them, there are a seemingly infinite placement combinations and often, believe it or not, the best people at chip floorplans are working from experience and hunches and they can't always give you a good answer as to why a particular pattern works and others don't. The stakes are high in chip design, and researchers have been trying to take the human guesswork out of this chip layout task and to drive toward more optimal designs. The task doesn't go away as we move towards chiplet designs, either, since all of those chiplets on a compute engine will need to be interconnected to be a virtual monolithic chip and all of the latencies and power consumption will have to be taken into effect for such circuit complexes. This is a natural job, it would seem, for AI techniques to help in chip design.