DeepSeq2: Enhanced Sequential Circuit Learning with Disentangled Representations

Circuit representation learning is increasingly pivotal in Electronic Design Automation (EDA), serving various downstream tasks with enhanced model efficiency and accuracy. One notable work, DeepSeq, has pioneered sequential circuit learning by encoding temporal correlations. However, it suffers from significant limitations including prolonged execution times and architectural inefficiencies. To address these issues, we introduce DeepSeq2, a novel framework that enhances the learning of sequential circuits, by innovatively mapping it into three distinct embedding spaces-structure, function, and sequential behavior-allowing for a more nuanced representation that captures the inherent complexities of circuit dynamics. By employing an efficient Directed Acyclic Graph Neural Network (DAG-GNN) that circumvents the recursive propagation used in DeepSeq, DeepSeq2 significantly reduces execution times and improves model scalability. Moreover, DeepSeq2 incorporates a unique supervision mechanism that captures transitioning behaviors within circuits more effectively. DeepSeq2 sets a new benchmark in sequential circuit representation learning, outperforming prior works in power estimation and reliability analysis.

DeepGate3: Towards Scalable Circuit Representation Learning

Circuit representation learning has shown promising results in advancing the field of Electronic Design Automation (EDA). Existing models, such as DeepGate Family, primarily utilize Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) to encode circuit netlists into gate-level embeddings. However, the scalability of GNN-based models is fundamentally constrained by architectural limitations, impacting their ability to generalize across diverse and complex circuit designs. To address these challenges, we introduce DeepGate3, an enhanced architecture that integrates Transformer modules following the initial GNN processing. This novel architecture not only retains the robust gate-level representation capabilities of its predecessor, DeepGate2, but also enhances them with the ability to model subcircuits through a novel pooling transformer mechanism. DeepGate3 is further refined with multiple innovative supervision tasks, significantly enhancing its learning process and enabling superior representation of both gate-level and subcircuit structures. Our experiments demonstrate marked improvements in scalability and generalizability over traditional GNN-based approaches, establishing a significant step forward in circuit representation learning technology.

Nemotron-4 340B Technical Report

We release the Nemotron-4 340B model family, including Nemotron-4-340B-Base, Nemotron-4-340B-Instruct, and Nemotron-4-340B-Reward. Our models are open access under the NVIDIA Open Model License Agreement, a permissive model license that allows distribution, modification, and use of the models and its outputs. These models perform competitively to open access models on a wide range of evaluation benchmarks, and were sized to fit on a single DGX H100 with 8 GPUs when deployed in FP8 precision. We believe that the community can benefit from these models in various research studies and commercial applications, especially for generating synthetic data to train smaller language models. Notably, over 98% of data used in our model alignment process is synthetically generated, showcasing the effectiveness of these models in generating synthetic data. To further support open research and facilitate model development, we are also open-sourcing the synthetic data generation pipeline used in our model alignment process.

DeepGate2: Functionality-Aware Circuit Representation Learning

Circuit representation learning aims to obtain neural representations of circuit elements and has emerged as a promising research direction that can be applied to various EDA and logic reasoning tasks. Existing solutions, such as DeepGate, have the potential to embed both circuit structural information and functional behavior. However, their capabilities are limited due to weak supervision or flawed model design, resulting in unsatisfactory performance in downstream tasks. In this paper, we introduce DeepGate2, a novel functionality-aware learning framework that significantly improves upon the original DeepGate solution in terms of both learning effectiveness and efficiency. Our approach involves using pairwise truth table differences between sampled logic gates as training supervision, along with a well-designed and scalable loss function that explicitly considers circuit functionality. Additionally, we consider inherent circuit characteristics and design an efficient one-round graph neural network (GNN), resulting in an order of magnitude faster learning speed than the original DeepGate solution. Experimental results demonstrate significant improvements in two practical downstream tasks: logic synthesis and Boolean satisfiability solving. The code is available at https://github.com/cure-lab/DeepGate2

DeepSeq: Deep Sequential Circuit Learning

Circuit representation learning is a promising research direction in the electronic design automation (EDA) field. With sufficient data for pre-training, the learned general yet effective representation can help to solve multiple downstream EDA tasks by fine-tuning it on a small set of task-related data. However, existing solutions only target combinational circuits, significantly limiting their applications. In this work, we propose DeepSeq, a novel representation learning framework for sequential netlists. Specifically, we introduce a dedicated graph neural network (GNN) with a customized propagation scheme to exploit the temporal correlations between gates in sequential circuits. To ensure effective learning, we propose to use a multi-task training objective with two sets of strongly related supervision: logic probability and transition probability at each node. A novel dual attention aggregation mechanism is introduced to facilitate learning both tasks efficiently. Experimental results on various benchmark circuits show that DeepSeq outperforms other GNN models for sequential circuit learning. We evaluate the generalization capability of DeepSeq on a downstream power estimation task. After fine-tuning, DeepSeq can accurately estimate power across various circuits under different workloads.

SATformer: Transformers for SAT Solving

In this paper, we propose SATformer, a novel Transformer-based solution for Boolean satisfiability (SAT) solving. Different from existing learning-based SAT solvers that learn at the problem instance level, SATformer learns the minimum unsatisfiable cores (MUC) of unsatisfiable problem instances, which provide rich information for the causality of such problems. Specifically, we apply a graph neural network (GNN) to obtain the embeddings of the clauses in the conjunctive normal format (CNF). A hierarchical Transformer architecture is applied on the clause embeddings to capture the relationships among clauses, and the self-attention weight is learned to be high when those clauses forming UNSAT cores are attended together, and set to be low otherwise. By doing so, SATformer effectively learns the correlations among clauses for SAT prediction. Experimental results show that SATformer is more powerful than existing end-to-end learning-based SAT solvers.

DeepTPI: Test Point Insertion with Deep Reinforcement Learning

Test point insertion (TPI) is a widely used technique for testability enhancement, especially for logic built-in self-test (LBIST) due to its relatively low fault coverage. In this paper, we propose a novel TPI approach based on deep reinforcement learning (DRL), named DeepTPI. Unlike previous learning-based solutions that formulate the TPI task as a supervised-learning problem, we train a novel DRL agent, instantiated as the combination of a graph neural network (GNN) and a Deep Q-Learning network (DQN), to maximize the test coverage improvement. Specifically, we model circuits as directed graphs and design a graph-based value network to estimate the action values for inserting different test points. The policy of the DRL agent is defined as selecting the action with the maximum value. Moreover, we apply the general node embeddings from a pre-trained model to enhance node features, and propose a dedicated testability-aware attention mechanism for the value network. Experimental results on circuits with various scales show that DeepTPI significantly improves test coverage compared to the commercial DFT tool. The code of this work is available at https://github.com/cure-lab/DeepTPI.

DeepSAT: An EDA-Driven Learning Framework for SAT

We present DeepSAT, a novel end-to-end learning framework for the Boolean satisfiability (SAT) problem. Unlike existing solutions trained on random SAT instances with relatively weak supervisions, we propose applying the knowledge of the well-developed electronic design automation (EDA) field for SAT solving. Specifically, we first resort to advanced logic synthesis algorithms to pre-process SAT instances into optimized and-inverter graphs (AIGs). By doing so, our training and test sets have a unified distribution, thus the learned model can generalize well to test sets of various sources of SAT instances. Next, we regard the distribution of SAT solutions being a product of conditional Bernoulli distributions. Based on this observation, we approximate the SAT solving procedure with a conditional generative model, leveraging a directed acyclic graph neural network with two polarity prototypes for conditional SAT modeling. To effectively train the generative model, with the help of logic simulation tools, we obtain the probabilities of nodes in the AIG being logic '1' as rich supervision. We conduct extensive experiments on various SAT instances. DeepSAT achieves significant accuracy improvements over state-of-the-art learning-based SAT solutions, especially when generalized to SAT instances that are large or with diverse distributions.

Representation Learning of Logic Circuits

Applying deep learning (DL) techniques in the electronic design automation (EDA) field has become a trending topic in recent years. Most existing solutions apply well-developed DL models to solve specific EDA problems. While demonstrating promising results, they require careful model tuning for every problem. The fundamental question on \textit{"How to obtain a general and effective neural representation of circuits?"} has not been answered yet. In this work, we take the first step towards solving this problem. We propose \textit{DeepGate}, a novel representation learning solution that effectively embeds both logic function and structural information of a circuit as vectors on each gate. Specifically, we propose transforming circuits into unified and-inverter graph format for learning and using signal probabilities as the supervision task in DeepGate. We then introduce a novel graph neural network that uses strong inductive biases in practical circuits as learning priors for signal probability prediction. Our experimental results show the efficacy and generalization capability of DeepGate.