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EvoDRC is a self-evolving framework designed to automate the repair of design rule violations (DRVs) in advanced-node physical design, addressing the significant bottleneck posed by manual engineering iterations. By initializing repair skills from a reference design and evolving them through experience from the target design, EvoDRC effectively manages complex geometric interactions while preserving circuit connectivity. Experiments demonstrate a remarkable 73.5% reduction in DRVs compared to baseline methods, showcasing the framework's efficiency and effectiveness in automated DRC closure.
Achieving a 73.5% reduction in design rule violations, EvoDRC revolutionizes the automation of DRC closure in advanced-node physical design.
Design rule check (DRC) closure remains a major bottleneck in advanced-node physical design. Although detailed routers are rule-aware, residual design rule violations (DRVs) often require manual engineering change order iterations. Automating this process is challenging because repairs must account for complex geometric interactions, preserve circuit connectivity, and avoid introducing new violations. We present EvoDRC, a skill-evolution framework for agentic block-level DRC repair. EvoDRC initializes layer-specific repair skills using knowledge distilled from an unrelated reference design and continuously evolves these skills using traceable repair experience collected from the target design. EvoDRC decomposes the layout into bounded repair regions and assigns an LLM repair agent to each region. Local DRC analysis, connectivity-checking, and impact-preview tools provide feedback on proposed modifications. Repair operations and their resulting DRV changes are stored in a knowledge database and used to evolve the repair skills. Experiments on seven block-level designs from the DAC26 DRC Benchmark show that EvoDRC achieves a 73.5\% overall reduction compared to the reported baseline.
