BBOPlace-Bench: Benchmarking Black-Box Optimization for Chip Placement

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Xue, Ke, Chen, Ruo-Tong, Tan, Rong-Xi, Lin, Xi, Shi, Yunqi, Xu, Siyuan, Yuan, Mingxuan, Qian, Chao
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Xue, Ke
Chen, Ruo-Tong
Tan, Rong-Xi
Lin, Xi
Shi, Yunqi
Xu, Siyuan
Yuan, Mingxuan
Qian, Chao
author_facet Xue, Ke
Chen, Ruo-Tong
Tan, Rong-Xi
Lin, Xi
Shi, Yunqi
Xu, Siyuan
Yuan, Mingxuan
Qian, Chao
contents Chip placement is a vital stage in modern chip design as it has a substantial impact on the subsequent processes and the overall quality of the final chip. The use of black-box optimization (BBO) for chip placement has a history of several decades. However, early efforts were limited by immature problem formulations and inefficient algorithm designs. Recent progress has shown the effectiveness and efficiency of BBO for chip placement, proving its potential to achieve state-of-the-art results. Despite these advancements, the field lacks a unified, BBO-specific benchmark for thoroughly assessing various problem formulations and BBO algorithms. To fill this gap, we propose BBOPlace-Bench, the first benchmark designed specifically for evaluating and developing BBO algorithms for chip placement tasks. It integrates three problem formulations of BBO for chip placement, and offers a modular, decoupled, and flexible framework that enables users to seamlessly implement, test, and compare their own algorithms. BBOPlace-Bench integrates a wide variety of existing BBO algorithms, including simulated annealing (SA), evolutionary algorithms (EAs), and Bayesian optimization (BO). Experimental results show that the problem formulations of mask-guided optimization and hyperparameter optimization exhibit superior performance than the sequence pair problem formulation, while EAs demonstrate better overall performance than SA and BO, especially in high-dimensional search spaces, and also achieve state-of-the-art performance compared to the mainstream chip placement methods. BBOPlace-Bench not only facilitates the development of efficient BBO-driven solutions for chip placement but also broadens the practical application scenarios (which are urgently needed) for the BBO community. The code of BBOPlace-Bench is available at https://github.com/lamda-bbo/BBOPlace-Bench.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2510_23472
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle BBOPlace-Bench: Benchmarking Black-Box Optimization for Chip Placement
Xue, Ke
Chen, Ruo-Tong
Tan, Rong-Xi
Lin, Xi
Shi, Yunqi
Xu, Siyuan
Yuan, Mingxuan
Qian, Chao
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Hardware Architecture
Neural and Evolutionary Computing
Chip placement is a vital stage in modern chip design as it has a substantial impact on the subsequent processes and the overall quality of the final chip. The use of black-box optimization (BBO) for chip placement has a history of several decades. However, early efforts were limited by immature problem formulations and inefficient algorithm designs. Recent progress has shown the effectiveness and efficiency of BBO for chip placement, proving its potential to achieve state-of-the-art results. Despite these advancements, the field lacks a unified, BBO-specific benchmark for thoroughly assessing various problem formulations and BBO algorithms. To fill this gap, we propose BBOPlace-Bench, the first benchmark designed specifically for evaluating and developing BBO algorithms for chip placement tasks. It integrates three problem formulations of BBO for chip placement, and offers a modular, decoupled, and flexible framework that enables users to seamlessly implement, test, and compare their own algorithms. BBOPlace-Bench integrates a wide variety of existing BBO algorithms, including simulated annealing (SA), evolutionary algorithms (EAs), and Bayesian optimization (BO). Experimental results show that the problem formulations of mask-guided optimization and hyperparameter optimization exhibit superior performance than the sequence pair problem formulation, while EAs demonstrate better overall performance than SA and BO, especially in high-dimensional search spaces, and also achieve state-of-the-art performance compared to the mainstream chip placement methods. BBOPlace-Bench not only facilitates the development of efficient BBO-driven solutions for chip placement but also broadens the practical application scenarios (which are urgently needed) for the BBO community. The code of BBOPlace-Bench is available at https://github.com/lamda-bbo/BBOPlace-Bench.
title BBOPlace-Bench: Benchmarking Black-Box Optimization for Chip Placement
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Hardware Architecture
Neural and Evolutionary Computing
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.23472