Differentiable-Timing-Driven Global Placement

Abstract

Placement is critical to the timing closure of the very-large-scale integrated (VLSI) circuit design flow. This paper proposes a differentiable-timing-driven global placement framework inspired by deep neural networks. By establishing the analogy between static timing analysis and neural network propagation, we propose a differentiable timing objective for placement to explicitly optimize timing metrics such as total negative slack (TNS) and worst negative slack (WNS). The framework can achieve at most 32.7% and 59.1% improvements on WNS and TNS respectively compared with the state-of-the-art timing-driven placer, and achieve 1.80× speed-up when both running on GPU.

Publication
59th ACM/IEEE Design Automation Conference (DAC) 2022

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Zizheng Guo
Zizheng Guo
Ph.D. Student

I am a first-year Ph.D. student at Peking University. My current research interests include data structures, algorithm design and GPU acceleration for combinatorial optimization problems, and the application of reinforcement learning in designing heuristic algorithms.