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David Z. Pan and Team Win IEEE TCAD Best Paper Award

IEEE TCAD

"DREAMPlace: Deep Learning Toolkit-Enabled GPU Acceleration for Modern VLSI Placement" by Dr. David Z. Pan, students, alumni, and collaborators, was selected as winner of the 2021 IEEE Transactions on Computer-Aided Design Donald O. Pederson Best Paper Award. The award was presented at the 2021 ACM/IEEE Design Automation Conference in December.

About the Project

Placement for very-large-scale integrated (VLSI) circuits is one of the most important steps for design closure. We propose a novel GPU-accelerated placement framework DREAMPlace, by casting the analytical placement problem equivalently to training a neural network. Implemented on top of a widely-adopted deep learning toolkit PyTorch, with customized key kernels for wirelength and density computations, DREAMPlace can achieve around 40× speedup in global placement without quality degradation compared to the state-of-the-art multi-threaded placer RePlAce. We believe this work shall open up new directions for revisiting classical EDA problems with advancements in AI hardware and software.

About the Authors

Dr. Yibo Lin is an Assistant Professor at Peking University, China. He received his PhD from Texas ECE under Prof. David Z. Pan in May 2018, and his BS from Shanghai Jiaotong University in 2013.

Zixuan Jiang is a PhD student in Texas ECE under the supervision of Dr. David Z. Pan. He received his BS from Zhejiang University in 2018.

Jiaqi Gu is a PhD student in Texas ECE under the supervision of Dr. David Z. Pan. He received his BS from Fudan University in 2018.

Dr. Wuxi Li is a Staff Software Engineer at Xilinx. He received his PhD from Texas ECE under the supervision of Dr. David Z. Pan in 2019, and his BS from Shanghai Jiaotong University in 2013.

Dr. Shounak Dhar is a Compiler Software Engineer at Amazon Web Services (AWS). He received his PhD from Texas ECE under the supervision of Dr. David Z. Pan in 2019, and his BS from India Institute of Technology, Bombay in 2014.

Dr. Haoxing Ren is a Senior Manager, Design Automation Research, and Principal Research Scientist at Nvidia Research. He received his PhD degree from Texas ECE under the supervision of Prof. David Z. Pan in 2006.

Dr. Brucek Khailany is a Senior Director of ASIC and VLSI Research at Nvidia Research. He received his PhD from Stanford in 2003.

Dr. David Z. Pan is a Professor in the Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering at The University of Texas at Austin and holds the Silicon Laboratories Endowed Chair in Electrical Engineering.

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