2021/11/10 by Amur Ghose, Ghose, Amur, Vincent Zhang +9 · 2 citations
Engineering · Materials Science · #Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Ferroelectric and Negative Capacitance Devices #Low-power high-performance VLSI design #Machine Learning (cs.LG) #Machine Learning in Materials Science
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2111.05941
openalex publication_date 2021/11/10 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Presently with technology node scaling, an accurate prediction model at early design stages can significantly reduce the design cycle. Especially during logic synthesis, predicting cell congestion due to improper logic combination can reduce the burden of subsequent physical implementations. There have been attempts using Graph Neural Network (GNN) techniques to tackle congestion prediction during the logic synthesis stage. However, they require informative cell features to achieve reasonable performance since the core idea of GNNs is built on the message passing framework, which would be impractical at the early logic synthesis stage. To address this limitation, we propose a framework that can directly learn embeddings for the given netlist to enhance the quality of our node features. Popular random-walk based embedding methods such as Node2vec, LINE, and DeepWalk suffer from the issue of cross-graph alignment and poor generalization to unseen netlist graphs, yielding inferior performance and costing significant runtime. In our framework, we introduce a superior alternative to obtain node embeddings that can generalize across netlist graphs using matrix factorization methods. We propose an efficient mini-batch training method at the sub-graph level that can guarantee parallel training and satisfy the memory restriction for large-scale netlists. We present results utilizing open-source EDA tools such as DREAMPLACE and OPENROAD frameworks on a variety of openly available circuits. By combining the learned embedding on top of the netlist with the GNNs, our method improves prediction performance, generalizes to new circuit lines, and is efficient in training, potentially saving over 90 % of runtime.