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GraphPlanner: Floorplanning with Graph Neural Network

Published: 24 December 2022 Publication History

Abstract

Chip floorplanning has long been a critical task with high computation complexity in the physical implementation of VLSI chips. Its key objective is to determine the initial locations of large chip modules with minimized wirelength while adhering to the density constraint, which in essence is a process of constructing an optimized mapping from circuit connectivity to physical locations. Proven to be an NP-hard problem, chip floorplanning is difficult to be solved efficiently using algorithmic approaches. This article presents GraphPlanner, a variational graph-convolutional-network-based deep learning technique for chip floorplanning. GraphPlanner is able to learn an optimized and generalized mapping between circuit connectivity and physical wirelength and produce a chip floorplan using efficient model inference. GraphPlanner is further equipped with an efficient clustering method, a unification of hyperedge coarsening with graph spectral clustering, to partition a large-scale netlist into high-quality clusters with minimized inter-cluster weighted connectivity. GraphPlanner has been integrated with two state-of-the-art mixed-size placers. Experimental studies using both academic benchmarks and industrial designs demonstrate that compared to state-of-the-art mixed-size placers alone, GraphPlanner improves placement runtime by 25% with 4% wirelength reduction on average.

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  • (2025)FTAFP: A Feedthrough-Aware Floorplanner for Hierarchical Design of Large-Scale SoCsProceedings of the 30th Asia and South Pacific Design Automation Conference10.1145/3658617.3697728(886-892)Online publication date: 20-Jan-2025
  • (2025)DG-RePlAce: A Dataflow-Driven GPU-Accelerated Analytical Global Placement Framework for Machine Learning AcceleratorsIEEE Transactions on Computer-Aided Design of Integrated Circuits and Systems10.1109/TCAD.2024.343652144:2(696-708)Online publication date: Feb-2025
  • (2024)Optimization of Analog Circuit Placement: A Graph Neural Network ApproachProceedings of the 2024 10th International Conference on Computing and Artificial Intelligence10.1145/3669754.3669815(399-403)Online publication date: 26-Apr-2024
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Published In

cover image ACM Transactions on Design Automation of Electronic Systems
ACM Transactions on Design Automation of Electronic Systems  Volume 28, Issue 2
March 2023
409 pages
ISSN:1084-4309
EISSN:1557-7309
DOI:10.1145/3573314
Issue’s Table of Contents

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

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Publication History

Published: 24 December 2022
Online AM: 17 August 2022
Accepted: 24 July 2022
Revised: 15 July 2022
Received: 15 February 2022
Published in TODAES Volume 28, Issue 2

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Author Tags

  1. Floorplanning
  2. physical design
  3. electronic design automation
  4. graph neural network
  5. deep learning

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  • Research-article
  • Refereed

Funding Sources

  • National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC)
  • National Key R&D Program of China
  • Young Scientist project of MOE

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Cited By

View all
  • (2025)FTAFP: A Feedthrough-Aware Floorplanner for Hierarchical Design of Large-Scale SoCsProceedings of the 30th Asia and South Pacific Design Automation Conference10.1145/3658617.3697728(886-892)Online publication date: 20-Jan-2025
  • (2025)DG-RePlAce: A Dataflow-Driven GPU-Accelerated Analytical Global Placement Framework for Machine Learning AcceleratorsIEEE Transactions on Computer-Aided Design of Integrated Circuits and Systems10.1109/TCAD.2024.343652144:2(696-708)Online publication date: Feb-2025
  • (2024)Optimization of Analog Circuit Placement: A Graph Neural Network ApproachProceedings of the 2024 10th International Conference on Computing and Artificial Intelligence10.1145/3669754.3669815(399-403)Online publication date: 26-Apr-2024
  • (2024)Graph-Based Ranking Techniques for Improving VLSI Placement2024 IEEE 15th Annual Ubiquitous Computing, Electronics & Mobile Communication Conference (UEMCON)10.1109/UEMCON62879.2024.10754775(715-719)Online publication date: 17-Oct-2024
  • (2024)Hierarchical Graph Learning-Based Floorplanning With Dirichlet Boundary ConditionsIEEE Transactions on Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI) Systems10.1109/TVLSI.2024.336366632:5(810-822)Online publication date: 8-Mar-2024
  • (2023)Stronger Mixed-Size Placement Backbone Considering Second-Order Information2023 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Computer Aided Design (ICCAD)10.1109/ICCAD57390.2023.10323700(1-9)Online publication date: 28-Oct-2023

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