Machine Learning-Enabled High-Frequency Low-Power Digital Design Implementation At Advanced Process Nodes

Abstract

Relentless pursuit of high-frequency low-power designs at advanced nodes necessitate achieving signoff-quality timing and power during digital implementation to minimize any over-design. With growing design sizes (1--10M instances), full flow runtime is an equally important metric and commercial implementation tools use graph-based timing analysis (GBA) to gain runtime over path-based timing analysis (PBA), at the cost of pessimism in timing. Last mile timing and power closure is then achieved through expensive PBA-driven engineering change order (ECO) loops in signoff stage. In this work, we explore "on-the-fly'' machine learning (ML) models to predict PBA timing based on GBA features, to drive digital implementation flow. Our ML model reduces the GBA vs. PBA pessimism with minimal runtime overhead, resulting in improved area/power without compromising on signoff timing closure. Experimental results obtained by integrating our technique in a commercial digital implementation tool show improvement of up to 0.92% in area, 11.7% and 1.16% in power in leakage- and total power-centric designs, respectively. Our method has a runtime overhead of $\sim$3% across a suite of 5--16nm industrial designs.