Design Space Exploration of Reinforcement Learning Configurations for Post-Legalization Placement

Abstract

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) and Reinforcement Learning (RL) have recently been explored for VLSI placement optimization, but their effectiveness for post-legalization placement refinement remains unclear. This paper presents a systematic design space exploration of a GNN-Proximal Policy Optimization (GNN-PPO) framework across three ISPD2015 benchmarks. We evaluate 18 configurations covering reward functions, GNN architectures, action spaces, candidate-set sizes, and training strategies. We analyse the results we obtain to identify pitfalls and to assess the prospects and opportunities of the RL methods for post-legalization placement. On top of that we propose a design classification approach to guide the design decisions of RL models.