High-Performance Arithmetic Circuit Optimization via Differentiable Architecture Search
Xilin Xia, Jie Wang, Wanbo Zhang, Zhihai Wang, Mingxuan Yuan, Jianye Hao, Feng Wu
Arithmetic circuit optimization remains a fundamental challenge in modern integrated circuit design. Recent advances have cast this problem within the Learning to Optimize (L2O) paradigm, where intelligent agents autonomously explore high-performance design spaces with encouraging results. However, existing approaches predominantly target coarse-grained architectural configurations, while the crucial interconnect optimization stage is often relegated to oversimplified proxy models or a heuristic approach. This disconnect undermines design quality, leading to suboptimal solutions in the circuit topology search space. To bridge this gap, we present **Arith-DAS**, a **D**ifferentiable **A**rchitecture **S**earch framework for **Arith**metic circuits. To the best of our knowledge, **Arith-DAS** is the first to formulate interconnect optimization within arithmetic circuits as a differentiable edge prediction problem over a multi-relational directed acyclic graph, enabling fine-grained, proxy-free optimization at the interconnection level. We evaluate **Arith-DAS** on a suite of representative arithmetic circuits, including multipliers and multiply-accumulate units. Experiments show substantial improvements over state-of-the-art L2O and conventional methods, achieving up to $\textbf{27.05}$% gain in hypervolume of area-delay Pareto front, a standard metric for evaluating multi-objective optimization performance. Moreover, integrating our optimized arithmetic units into large-scale AI accelerators yields up to $\textbf{6.59}$% delay reduction, demonstrating both scalability and real-world applicability.