LAG-Sizer: A Novel Gate Sizer Based on Leak Generative Adversarial Network with Feature Fusion

Gate sizing is an NP-hard problem to achieve Performance, Power and Area (PPA) optimization. Recently proposed learning-based approaches struggle to overcome the runtime issue of traditional heuristics, but lack the consideration of the intrinsic features for candidate gates in library and could not address the inequality issue of candidate sizes for different gates properly, suffering from insufficient design space exploration and inaccurate sizing assignment. In this work, based on a variant of generative adversarial network, Leak Adversarial Generation (LAG), a novel LAG-Sizer is proposed to model gate sizing as sequence generation problem, which breaks the traditional adversarial network by leaking the discriminator feature information into the generator to guide sizing generation. Feature fusion technique is introduced to comprehensively consider circuit feature and cell library feature while a unified classification is proposed to perfectly solve the inequality issue for sizing. The proposed sizer was validated with IWLS2005 and Opencores benchmark circuits under 22nm process. Experimental results demonstrate that an average of 4.6% Total Negative Slack (TNS) improvement and 15.6% number of violating endpoints (NVE) reduction are achieved by this work with similar area and power consumption compared to commercial tools as well as significant runtime speedup of 47.8×.