On Legalization of Die Bonding Bumps and Pads for 3D ICs

State-of-the-art 3D IC Place-and-Route flows were designed with older technology nodes and aggressive bonding pitch assumptions. As a result, these flows fail to honor the width and spacing rules for the 3D vias with realistic pitch values. We propose a critical new 3D via legalization stage during routing to reduce such violations. A force-based solver and bipartite-matching algorithm with Bayesian optimization are presented as viable legalizers and are compatible with various process nodes, bonding technologies, and partitioning types.

BufFormer: A Generative ML Framework for Scalable Buffering

Buffering is a prevalent interconnect optimization technique to help timing closure and is often performed after placement. A common buffering approach is to construct a Steiner tree and then buffers are inserted on the tree based on Ginneken-Lillis style algorithm. Such an approach is difficult to scale with large nets. Our work attempts to solve this problem with a generative machine-learning (ML) approach without Steiner tree construction. Our approach can extract and reuse knowledge from high quality samples and therefore has significantly improved scalability.

AutoDMP: Automated DREAMPlace-based Macro Placement

Macro placement is a critical very large-scale integration (VLSI) physical design problem that significantly impacts the design powerperformance-area (PPA) metrics. This paper proposes AutoDMP, a methodology that leverages DREAMPlace, a GPU-accelerated placer, to place macros and standard cells concurrently in conjunction with automated parameter tuning using a multi-objective hyperparameter optimization technique.

NVCell 2: Routability-Driven Standard Cell Layout in Advanced Nodes with Lattice Graph Routability Model

Standard cells are essential components of modern digital circuit designs. With process technologies advancing beyond the 5nm node, more routability issues have arisen due to the decreasing number of routing tracks, increasing number and complexity of design rules, and strict patterning rules. Automatic standard cell synthesis tools are struggling to design cells with severe routability issues.

DREAM-GAN: Advancing DREAMPlace towards Commercial-Quality using Generative Adversarial Learning

DREAMPlace is a renowned open-source placer that provides GPUacceleratable infrastructure for placements of Very-Large-ScaleIntegration (VLSI) circuits. However, due to its limited focus on wirelength and density, existing placement solutions of DREAMPlace are not applicable to industrial design flows. To improve DREAMPlace towards commercial-quality without knowing the black-boxed algorithms of the tools, in this paper, we present DREAM-GAN, a placement optimization framework that advances DREAMPlace using generative adversarial learning.

Reinforcement Learning Guided Detailed Routing for Custom Circuits

Detailed routing is the most tedious and complex procedure in design automation and has become a determining factor in layout automation in advanced manufacturing nodes. Despite continuing advances in custom integrated circuit (IC) routing research, industrial custom layout flows remain heavily manual due to the high complexity of the custom IC design problem.

Learning Autonomous Vehicle Safety Concepts from Demonstrations

Evaluating the safety of an autonomous vehicle (AV) depends on the behavior of surrounding agents which can be heavily influenced by factors such as environmental context and informally-defined driving etiquette. A key challenge is in determining a minimum set of assumptions on what constitutes reasonable foreseeable behaviors of other road users for the development of AV safety models and techniques.

BITS: Bi-level Imitation for Traffic Simulation

Simulation is the key to scaling up validation and verification for robotic systems such as autonomous vehicles. Despite advances in high-fidelity physics and sensor simulation, a critical gap remains in simulating realistic behaviors of road users. This is because, unlike simulating physics and graphics, devising first principle models for human-like behaviors is generally infeasible. In this work, we take a data-driven approach and propose a method that can learn to generate traffic behaviors from real-world driving logs.

Expanding the Deployment Envelope of Behavior Prediction via Adaptive Meta-Learning

Learning-based behavior prediction methods are increasingly being deployed in real-world autonomous systems, e.g., in fleets of self-driving vehicles, which are beginning to commercially operate in major cities across the world. Despite their advancements, however, the vast majority of prediction systems are specialized to a set of well-explored geographic regions or operational design domains, complicating deployment to additional cities, countries, or continents. Towards this end, we present a novel method for efficiently adapting behavior prediction models to new environments.