RapidLayout: Fast Hard Block Placement of FPGA-optimized Systolic Arrays Using Evolutionary Algorithm
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
Evolutionary algorithms can outperform conventional placement algorithms such as simulated annealing, analytical placement, and manual placement on runtime, wirelength, pipelining cost, and clock frequency when mapping hard block intensive designs such as systolic arrays on Xilinx UltraScale+ FPGAs. For certain hard-block intensive designs, the commercial-grade Xilinx Vivado CAD tool cannot provide legal routing solutions without tedious manual placement constraints. Instead, we formulate hard block placement as a multi-objective optimization problem that targets wirelength squared and bounding box size. We build an end-to-end placement-and-routing flow called RapidLayout using the Xilinx RapidWright framework. RapidLayout runs 5–6 \( \times \) faster than Vivado with manual constraints and eliminates the weeks-long effort to manually generate placement constraints. RapidLayout enables transfer learning from similar devices and bootstrapping from much smaller devices. Transfer learning in the UltraScale+ family achieves 11–14 \( \times \) shorter runtime and bootstrapping from a 97% smaller device delivers 2.1–3.2 \( \times \) faster optimizations. RapidLayout outperforms (1) a tuned simulated annealer by 2.7–30.8 \( \times \) in runtime while achieving similar quality of results, (2) VPR by 1.5 \( \times \) in runtime, 1.9–2.4 \( \times \) in wirelength, and 3–4 \( \times \) in bounding box size, while also (3) beating the analytical placer UTPlaceF by 9.3 \( \times \) in runtime, 1.8–2.2 \( \times \) in wirelength, and 2–2.7 \( \times \) in bounding box size.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it