Critical Paths Prediction under Multiple Corners Based on BiLSTM Network

Critical path generation poses significant challenge to integrated circuit (IC) design flow in terms of huge computational complexity and crucial impact to circuit optimization, whose early prediction is of vital importance for accelerating the design closure, especially under multiple process-voltage-temperature (PVT) corners. In this work, a post-routing critical path prediction framework is proposed based on Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory (BiLSTM) network and Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP) network to learn from the sequential features and global features at logic synthesis stage, which are extracted from the timing and physical information of cell sequences and operation conditions for circuit respectively. Experimental results demonstrate that with the proposed framework, the average prediction accuracy of critical paths achieves 95.0% and 93.6% for seen and unseen circuits in terms of F1-score for ISCAS’89 benchmark circuits under TSMC 22nm process, demonstrating an increase of 10.8% and 13.9% compared with existing learning-based critical paths prediction method.