A Hybrid Reinforcement Learning Framework for Efficient Physical Design Parameter Tuning

Traditional Design Space Exploration (DSE) methods in Physical Design (PD), such as Bayesian Optimization (BO) and Ant Colony Optimization (ACO), as well as state-of-the-art commercial tools like Synopsys DSO.ai, typically treat the design flow as a black box, lacking insight into the underlying designs. This hinders their ability to generalize across unseen designs. In this article, we introduce FastTuner, an innovative Reinforcement Learning (RL) agent that leverages Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) and Transformers to understand the underlying designs and enable rapid DSE on unseen designs across various PD stages. Our approach incorporates an attention-based framework for autoregressive and conditional parameter tuning and introduces a power, performance and area (PPA) estimator to predict end-of-flow PPA metrics, significantly accelerating RL reward computation. Extensive evaluations on seven industrial designs using the TSMC 28nm technology node demonstrate that FastTuner significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art DSE techniques in both optimization quality and runtime, achieving improvements of up to 79.38% in Total Negative Slack (TNS), 12.22% in total power, and more than 50x reduction in runtime.