A customized graph neural network model for guiding analog IC placement
Yaguang Li, Yishuang Lin, Meghna Madhusudan, Arvind Sharma, Wenbin Xu, Sachin S. Sapatnekar, Ramesh Harjani, Jiang Hu
Abstract
Analog IC placement is typically a manual process that requires strong experience and trial-and-error iterations as it produces a large impact to circuit performance in a complicated manner. Although automatic analog placement has been studied for decades, existing methods are inadequate for achieving performance comparable with manual designs. In this work, a customized graph neural network model is developed for predicting the impact of placement on circuit performance. Knowledge obtained by such a model can be transferred among different topologies of the same circuit type. Simulation results show that the proposed model is superior to a recent CNN-based work in terms of both accuracy and knowledge transfer. It also outperforms a plug-in use of graph attention network. The proposed model is further applied in analog IC placement and achieves performance similar to manual designs.