Versatile Multi-stage Graph Neural Network for Circuit Representation

Shuwen Yang, Zhihao Yang, Dong Li, Yingxue Zhang, Zhanguang Zhang, Guojie Song, Jianye HAO

Keywords: EDA, Circuit Design, logic synthesis, graph neural network, graph representation learning

TL;DR: We proposed a circuit representation method that achieves efficiecy and effectiveness across multiple EDA tasks and devolopment stages.

Abstract: Due to the rapid growth in the scale of circuits and the desire for knowledge transfer from old designs to new ones, deep learning technologies have been widely exploited in Electronic Design Automation (EDA) to assist circuit design. In chip design cycles, we might encounter heterogeneous and diverse information sources, including the two most informative ones: the netlist and the design layout. However, handling each information source independently is sub-optimal. In this paper, we propose a novel way to integrate the multiple information sources under a unified heterogeneous graph named Circuit Graph, where topological and geometrical information is well integrated. Then, we propose Circuit GNN to fully utilize the features of vertices, edges as well as heterogeneous information during the message passing process. It is the first attempt to design a versatile circuit representation that is compatible across multiple EDA tasks and stages. Experiments on the two most representative prediction tasks in EDA show that our solution reaches state-of-the-art performance in both logic synthesis and global placement chip design stages. Besides, it achieves a 10x speed-up on congestion prediction compared to the state-of-the-art model.