Physics-Guided Geometric Diffusion for Macro Placement Generation

Physics-Guided Geometric Diffusion for Macro Placement Generation

Jongho Yoon, Jinsung Jeon, Seokhyeong Kang

Proceedings of the Thirty-Fifth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
AI4Tech: AI Enabling Technologies. Pages 6609-6616. https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2026/735

Macro placement is a pivotal stage in VLSI physical design, fundamentally determining the overall chip performance. Recent data-driven placement methods have demonstrated significant potential, yet they often struggle to handle sequential dependencies and to balance topological connectivity with physical constraints. To bridge this gap, we propose MacroDiff+, a physics-guided geometric diffusion framework. Specifically, we design a dual-domain denoising architecture that couples topological connectivity encoded by heterogeneous GNNs with global geometric context modeled by a Transformer. Furthermore, we introduce Physics-Guided Sampling, an inference strategy that actively steers the generation using explicit gradients to ensure both statistical plausibility and physical validity. On the ISPD2005 MMS benchmarks, MacroDiff+ outperforms state-of-the-art baselines with a 6.1–6.2% reduction in wirelength. Notably, it exhibits superior stability and scalability on large-scale designs where prior methods fail to converge. The source code is provided at https://github.com/jhy00n/MacroDiff-plus.
Keywords:
Advanced AI4Tech: Generative and LLMs-driven AI4Tech
AI4Tech infrastructure/systems: AI chips, AI sensors, AI computers
Domain-specific AI4Tech: AI4Manufacturing
Emerging AI4Tech : Emerging AI4Tech areas