Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) and tool-using autonomous agents present new opportunities for accelerating research and development in physical design. Unlike earlier uses of machine learning that focused narrowly on prediction or optimization subroutines, agentic AI systems can comprehend user specifications, modify code, run EDA tools, analyze results, perform multi-step reasoning, and iteratively refine design heuristics. This paper surveys the emerging landscape of agentic AI for physical design R&D, with emphasis on (i) tool-integrated agents for algorithm evolution, debugging, and workflow automation, (ii) autonomous exploration of heuristic spaces in placement, routing, and partitioning, and (iii) interfaces between agents and traditional EDA frameworks. We analyze recent experience with multi-agent workflows and benchmark evaluation, highlighting current capabilities, limitations, and research frontiers. We conclude by articulating the long-term prospects of agentic AI as a catalyst for accelerated innovation in physical design, including autonomous algorithm discovery, continuous tool improvement, and closed-loop learning from large design corpora.

ML for IC physical design must be deployed in order to have business impacts. However, deployment in production must navigate many practical considerations, including choice of targets, skillsets and infrastructure, expectations and resources, data, and "MLOps". Furthermore, usage of ML is not the same as IC design practice and capability. In this invited paper, we give perspectives on basic strategies for selecting applications and pursuing deployment for ML in IC physical design. Example aspects include checklists for data and ML models, evaluation of model performance and progress on the path to deployment, the shifting landscape of MLOps, and challenges of "LLM-ability".

Over the past year, IEEE CEDA DATC has continued to improve the DATC Robust Design Flow (RDF) while continuing to expand initiatives that advance open infrastructures and culture changes, serving the global community of EDA researchers and users. This invited paper focuses on three highlights: (1) establishment of an accessible, "contrib-like" GitHub resource that provides a more accessible environment for OpenROAD- and OpenROAD-flow-scripts-based research works; (2) the first-ever permission mechanism and benchmarking results for a commercial EDA P&R tool, published with permissions developed with the tool vendor (Siemens EDA); and (3) efforts that support a nascent "ML EDA Commons". The paper also provides brief reviews of the past year’s RDF developments and roadmap updates.

Boolean satisfiability (SAT) problems are routinely solved by SAT solvers in real-life applications, yet solving time can vary drastically between solvers for the same instance.This has motivated research into machine learning models that can predict, for a given SAT instance, which solver to select among several options.Existing SAT solver selection methods all rely on some hand-picked instance features, which are costly to compute and ignore the structural information in SAT graphs.In this paper we present GraSS, a novel approach for automatic SAT solver selection based on tripartite graph representations of instances and a heterogeneous graph neural network (GNN) model.While GNNs have been previously adopted in other SAT-related tasks, they do not incorporate any domain-specific knowledge and ignore the runtime variation introduced by different clause orders.We enrich the graph representation with domain-specific decisions, such as novel node feature design, positional encodings for clauses in the graph, a GNN architecture tailored to our tripartite graphs and a runtime-sensitive loss function.Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that this combination of raw representations and domain-specific choices leads to improvements in runtime for a pool of seven state-of-theart solvers on both an industrial circuit design benchmark, and

Contrastive learning has emerged as a premier method for learning representations with or without supervision. Recent studies have shown its utility in graph representation learning for pre-training. Despite successes, the understanding of how to design effective graph augmentations that can capture structural properties common to many different types of downstream graphs remains incomplete. We propose a set of well-motivated graph transformation operations derived via graph spectral analysis to provide a bank of candidates when constructing augmentations for a graph contrastive objective, enabling contrastive learning to capture useful structural representation from pre-training graph datasets. We first present a spectral graph cropping augmentation that involves filtering nodes by applying thresholds to the eigenvalues of the leading Laplacian eigenvectors. Our second novel augmentation reorders the graph frequency components in a structural Laplacian-derived position graph embedding. Further, we introduce a method that leads to improved views of local subgraphs by performing alignment via global random walk embeddings. Our experimental results indicate consistent improvements in out-of-domain graph data transfer compared to state-of-the-art graph contrastive learning methods, shedding light on how to design a graph learner that is able to learn structural properties common to diverse graph types.

The construction of adversarial examples usually requires the existence of soft or hard labels for each instance, with respect to which a loss gradient provides the signal for construction of the example. We show that for batch normalized deep image recognition architectures, intermediate latents that are produced after a batch normalization step by themselves suffice to produce adversarial examples using an intermediate loss solely utilizing angular deviations, without relying on any label. We motivate our loss through the geometry of batch normed representations and their concentration of norm on a hypersphere and distributional proximity to Gaussians. Our losses expand intermediate latent based attacks that usually require labels. The success of our method implies that leakage of intermediate representations may create a security breach for deployed models, which persists even when the model is transferred to downstream usage. Removal of batch norm weakens our attack, indicating it contributes to this vulnerability. Our attacks also succeed against LayerNorm empirically, thus being relevant for transformer architectures, most notably vision transformers which we analyze.

Presently with technology node scaling, an accurate prediction model at early design stages can significantly reduce the design cycle. Especially during logic synthesis, predicting cell congestion due to improper logic combination can reduce the burden of subsequent physical implementations. There have been attempts using Graph Neural Network (GNN) techniques to tackle congestion prediction during the logic synthesis stage. However, they require informative cell features to achieve reasonable performance since the core idea of GNNs is built on the message passing framework, which would be impractical at the early logic synthesis stage. To address this limitation, we propose a framework that can directly learn embeddings for the given netlist to enhance the quality of our node features. Popular random-walk based embedding methods such as Node2vec, LINE, and DeepWalk suffer from the issue of cross-graph alignment and poor generalization to unseen netlist graphs, yielding inferior performance and costing significant runtime. In our framework, we introduce a superior alternative to obtain node embeddings that can generalize across netlist graphs using matrix factorization methods. We propose an efficient mini-batch training method at the sub-graph level that can guarantee parallel training and satisfy the memory restriction for large-scale netlists. We present results utilizing open-source EDA tools such as DREAMPLACE and OPENROAD frameworks on a variety of openly available circuits. By combining the learned embedding on top of the netlist with the GNNs, our method improves prediction performance, generalizes to new circuit lines, and is efficient in training, potentially saving over 90% of runtime.

The variational autoencoder is a well defined deep generative model that utilizes an encoder-decoder framework where an encoding neural network outputs a non-deterministic code for reconstructing an input. The encoder achieves this by sampling from a distribution for every input, instead of outputting a deterministic code per input. The great advantage of this process is that it allows the use of the network as a generative model for sampling from the data distribution beyond provided samples for training. We show in this work that utilizing batch normalization as a source for non-determinism suffices to turn deterministic autoencoders into generative models on par with variational ones, so long as we add a suitable entropic regularization to the training objective.

In this paper, we present Prometheus, a graph partitioning based algorithm that creates multiple variable decompositions efficiently for learning Sum-Product Network structures across both continuous and discrete domains. Prometheus proceeds by creating multiple candidate decompositions that are represented compactly with an acyclic directed graph in which common parts of different decompositions are shared. It eliminates the correlation threshold hyperparameter often used in other structure learning techniques, allowing Prometheus to learn structures that are robust in low data regimes. Prometheus outperforms other structure learning techniques in 30 discrete and continuous domains. We also extend Prometheus to exploit sparsity in correlations between features in order to obtain an efficient sub-quadratic algorithm (w.r.t. the number of features) that scales better to high dimensional datasets.