Abstract
Slowdown in process scaling is putting increasing pressure on EDA tools to bridge the power, performance and area (PPA) entitlement gap of Moore's Law. State-of-the-art designs are pushing the PPA envelope to the limit, accompanied by increasing design size and complexity, and shrinking time-tomarket constraints. Al/ML techniques provide a promising direction to address many of the modeling and convergence challenges seen in physical design flows. Further, the promise of intelligent design tools capable of exploring the solution space efficiently brings game-changing possibilities to next-generation design methodologies. In this talk we will discuss various challenges and opportunities in delivering best-in-class PPA closure with AI/ML augmented digital implementation tools. We will also talk about some aspects of large-scale industrial adoption of such a system and the AI capabilities needed to power these tools to minimize the need for an expert user, or endless tool iterations.