WCPNet: Jointly Predicting Wirelength, Congestion and Power for FPGA Using Multi-Task Learning

To speed up the design closure and improve the QoR of FPGA, supervised single-task machine learning techniques have been used to predict individual design metric based on placement results. However, the design objective is to achieve optimal performance while considering multiple conflicting metrics. The single-task approaches predict each metric in isolation and neglect the potential correlations or dependencies among them. To address the limitations, this article proposes a multi-task learning approach to jointly predict wirelength, congestion and power. By sharing the common feature representations and adopting the joint optimization strategy, the novel WCPNet models (including WCPNet-HS and WCPNet-SS) cannot only predict the three metrics of different scales simultaneously, but also outperform the majority of single-task models in terms of both prediction performance and time cost, which are demonstrated by the results of the cross design experiment. By adopting the cross-stitch structure in the encoder, WCPNet-SS outperforms WCPNet-HS in prediction performance, but WCPNet-HS is faster because of the simpler parameters sharing structure. The significance of the feature image pinUtilization on predicting power and wirelength are demonstrated by the ablation experiment.