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Chip Placement with Deep Reinforcement Learning

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arxiv 2004.10746 v1 pith:CYFJ6B7M submitted 2020-04-22 cs.LG cs.AI

classification cs.LGcs.AI
keywords chiplearningplacementblocksnetlistsplacementsapproacharchitecture
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal
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In this work, we present a learning-based approach to chip placement, one of the most complex and time-consuming stages of the chip design process. Unlike prior methods, our approach has the ability to learn from past experience and improve over time. In particular, as we train over a greater number of chip blocks, our method becomes better at rapidly generating optimized placements for previously unseen chip blocks. To achieve these results, we pose placement as a Reinforcement Learning (RL) problem and train an agent to place the nodes of a chip netlist onto a chip canvas. To enable our RL policy to generalize to unseen blocks, we ground representation learning in the supervised task of predicting placement quality. By designing a neural architecture that can accurately predict reward across a wide variety of netlists and their placements, we are able to generate rich feature embeddings of the input netlists. We then use this architecture as the encoder of our policy and value networks to enable transfer learning. Our objective is to minimize PPA (power, performance, and area), and we show that, in under 6 hours, our method can generate placements that are superhuman or comparable on modern accelerator netlists, whereas existing baselines require human experts in the loop and take several weeks.

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Forward citations

Cited by 6 Pith papers

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score. Full citation record

  1. MAGE: Human-Like Macro Placement via Agentic Multimodal Reasoning

    cs.AI 2026-07 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    A multi-agent vision-language framework for chip macro placement improves post-route timing (WNS/TNS) over commercial, human, and Hier-RTLMP baselines while trading higher wirelength, and introduces four human-likenes...

  2. Graph Neural Networks for Automatic Addition of Optimizing Components in Printed Circuit Board Schematics

    cs.LG 2025-06 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    Graph neural networks trained on bipartite graphs of PCB schematics predict expert-chosen locations for added resistors and capacitors with about 85% precision-recall scores.

  3. Large Processor Chip Model

    cs.AR 2025-06 reject novelty 5.0 of 10

    The paper proposes a three-level LLM-based framework for end-to-end computer architecture design, with a claimed 3DGS case study whose quantitative results are not fully supported.

  4. QForce-RL: Quantized FPGA-Optimized Reinforcement Learning Compute Engine

    cs.AR 2025-06 reject novelty 4.0 of 10

    QForce-RL is a quantized, reconfigurable FPGA compute engine for reinforcement learning inference that claims up to 2.6x FPS and substantial resource savings versus prior accelerators.

  5. QiMeng: Fully Automated Hardware and Software Design for Processor Chip

    cs.AR 2025-06 conditional novelty 4.0 of 10

    QiMeng is a proposed three-layer architecture for automating processor hardware and software design, with several published components but no integrated implementation yet.

  6. PGR-DRC: Pre-Global Routing DRC Violation Prediction Using Unsupervised Learning

    cs.AR 2025-06 conditional novelty 3.0 of 10

    A one-class Gaussian anomaly detector, trained only on violation-free layout grids, predicts DRC violations before global routing with 99.95% reported test accuracy and 100% recall in the paper's own evaluation.

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