Machine Learning Framework for Early Routability Prediction with Artificial Netlist Generator

Recent routability research has exploited a machine learning (ML)-based modeling methodologies to consider various routability factors that are derived from placement solution. These factors are very related to the circuit characteristics (e.g., pin density, routing congestion, demand of routing resources, etc), and lack of circuit benchmarks in training can lead to poor predictability for 'unseen' circuit designs. In this paper, we propose a machine learning (ML) framework for early routability prediction modeling. The method includes a new artificial netlist generator (ANG) that generates an artificial gate-level netlist from the user-specified topology characteristics of synthetic circuit, even with real world circuit-like. In this framework, we exploit that ANG that supports obtaining ground truths for use in training ML-based model, the training dataset that have a wide range of topological characteristics provides strong ability to inference noisy, previous-unseen data. Compared to a design-specific training dataset [4] that is used for routability prediction modeling, we increase the test accuracy of binary classification ('pass' or 'fail') on timing, DRC and routability by 6.3%, 8.6% and 6.6%, and reduce the generalization error [12] by as much as 87% compared to design-specific training dataset [4].1