Jing's team won the Second Place in the MLCAD 2023 FPGA Macro Placement Contest

I am thrilled to announce that our team MPKU won the Second Place in the MLCAD 2023 FPGA Macro Placement Contest! 🎉 🏆

I would like to express my sincere gratitude to my teammates Jiarui Wang, Yifan Chen, Zizheng Guo, Xun Jiang and our advisors Prof. Yun Liang and Prof. Yibo Lin! 💖

The 1st MLCAD Contest (on FPGA Macro-Placement) is a heroic effort led by Contest Chair Ismail Bustany and the organizing committee (Meghraj Kalase, Wuxi Li, Grigor Gasparyan, Bodhisatta Pramanik, Andrew Kahng, Amit Gupta). All contest teams were evaluated on 140 public and many hidden benchmarks by the organizers using Vivado. This might be the most number of circuit benchmarks in an EDA contest! 😀 👍

Notably, our team submitted an updated executable for our macro placer after the contest deadline, following a request from contest organizers to incorporate a fix for benchmark file parsing errors. After fixing the errors, we achieved the best scores on the public benchmark. We believe it is important to share these results with all participants and the broader MLCAD community to accurately establish a baseline of best-in-class results. Feel free to check out our updated code OpenPARF-MLCAD2023 for the contest! 💻

For more details about this contest, please see the contest benchmarks and results in the slide deck and the contest paper. 📄