An Updated Assessment of Reinforcement Learning for Macro Placement
Chung-Kuan Cheng, Andrew B. Kahng, Sayak Kundu, Yucheng Wang, Zhiang Wang
备注：
There are total sixteen pages and two pages for the appendix. It includes six figures and eleven tables. This paper has been accepted and published in IEEE Transactions on CAD
We provide an improved assessment of Google Brain's deep reinforcement learning approach to macro placement and its updated Circuit Training (CT) implementation in GitHub. A stronger simulated annealing (SA) baseline leverages the "go-with-the-winners" metaheuristic and a multi-threading implementation. We develop and release new public benchmarks in sub-10nm technology: LEF/DEF for Google's 7nm TSMC Ariane protobuf and scaled variants, as well as testcases implemented in the open-source ASAP7 7nm research enablement. We evaluate from-scratch training and fine-tuning results for the latest "AlphaChip" release of Circuit Training, alongside multiple alternative macro placers. We also study the recently-published pre-training guidance in. A commercial place-and-route tool is used to provide "true reward" post-route power, performance and area metrics. All data, evaluation flows and related scripts are publicly available in the MacroPlacement GitHub repository. Our study affords insights into reproducibility and reporting in the research literature, and points out still-missing confirmations (e.g., of CT's scalability and pre-training methodology) that remain open questions for the research community.
Department of EECS, UC Berkeley, CA, USA（UC伯克利电子工程与计算机科学系）；SambaNova Systems Inc., Palo Alto, CA, USA（SambaNova Systems公司）；Computer Science Department, Stanford University, CA, USA（斯坦福大学计算机科学系）
Physics-Guided Geometric Diffusion for Macro Placement Generation
POSTECH Institute of Artificial Intelligence（POSTECH人工智能研究所）；KAIST InnoCORE LLM（韩国科学技术院InnoCORE语言模型实验室）；Seoul National University（首尔国立大学）；Pohang University of Science and Technology（釜山科学技术大学）
University of Amsterdam（阿姆斯特丹大学）；Qualcomm AI Research（高通人工智能研究院）；QT Technologies Ireland Limited（QT技术爱尔兰有限公司）；QUALCOMM India Private Limited（高通印度私人有限公司）
