Skip to yearly menu bar Skip to main content


Poster

Reinforcement Learning within Tree Search for Fast Macro Placement

Zijie Geng · Jie Wang · Ziyan Liu · Siyuan Xu · Zhentao Tang · Mingxuan Yuan · Jianye Hao · Yongdong Zhang · Feng Wu


Abstract:

Macro placement is a crucial step in modern chip design, and reinforcement learning (RL) has recently emerged as a promising technique for improving the placement quality. However, existing RL-based techniques are hindered by their low sample efficiency, requiring numerous online rollouts or substantial offline expert data to achieve bootstrap, which are often impractical in industrial scenarios. To address this challenge, we propose a novel sample-efficient framework, namely EfficientPlace, for fast macro placement. EfficientPlace integrates a global tree search algorithm to strategically direct the optimization process, as well as a RL agent for local policy learning to advance the tree search. Experiments on commonly used benchmarks demonstrate that EfficientPlace achieves remarkable placement quality within a short timeframe, outperforming recent state-of-the-art approaches.

Live content is unavailable. Log in and register to view live content