Assessment of Reinforcement Learning for Macro Placement

We provide open, transparent implementation and assessment of Google Brain's deep reinforcement learning approach to macro placement [9] and its Circuit Training (CT) implementation in Git-Hub [23]. We implement in open-source key "blackbox" elements of CT, and clarify discrepancies between CT and [9]. New testcases on open enablements are developed and released. We assess CT alongside multiple alternative macro placers, with all evaluation flows and related scripts public in GitHub. Our experiments also encompass academic mixed-size placement benchmarks, as well as ablation and stability studies. We comment on the impact of [9] and CT, as well as directions for future research.