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Record W4417065140 · doi:10.1145/3779435

Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning in Designing the Low-Dropout Regulator Circuits

2025· article· en· W4417065140 on OpenAlex
Thang Quoc Nguyen, Lihong Zhang, Octavia A. Dobre, Trang Hoang, Trung Q. Duong

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

affAt least one author lists a Canadian institution in the pinned OpenAlex snapshot.
fundA Canadian funder is recorded on the work.

Bibliographic record

VenueACM Transactions on Design Automation of Electronic Systems · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldEngineering
TopicVLSI and FPGA Design Techniques
Canadian institutionsMemorial University of Newfoundland
FundersNatural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of CanadaMemorial University of NewfoundlandCanada Excellence Research Chairs, Government of Canada
KeywordsSizingReinforcement learningAutomationParticle swarm optimizationElectronic design automationProcess (computing)Rendering (computer graphics)Engineering design process

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Low-dropout regulator (LDO) circuit, whose function is to provide a power supply robust to variations in process, voltage, and temperature (PVT), is an essential part in any system-on-chip. Therefore, the design of this circuit must satisfy various intricate specifications, rendering the design process generally perceived as tedious and lengthy. As a result, previous research has been conducted to explore the use of machine learning, particularly reinforcement learning, in speeding up and automating the LDO design process, especially the sizing phase. However, the results of these works are limited in terms of the number of design variables and specifications handled by the automation engine. This study presents the application of single-agent proximal policy optimization (PPO) and multi-agent proximal policy optimization (MAPPO), including both parameter-separated and parameter-sharing methods, to address the LDO sizing automation problem. The experimental result shows that the PPO- and MAPPO-based implementation in LDO sizing automation outperforms that of the classical particle swarm optimization algorithm. We demonstrate that the parameter-separated MAPPO features the most effective learning process compared with other PPO-based benchmarks, resulting in a design result that is competitive to that of a well-known commercial tool.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not 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.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.001
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Simulation or modeling · Consensus signal: Simulation or modeling
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.993
Threshold uncertainty score0.793

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0010.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.001
Science and technology studies0.0000.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

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.

Opus teacher head0.016
GPT teacher head0.241
Teacher spread0.225 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it