From Tool Invocation to Source-Mechanism Exploration: Protected White-Box DSE for Open-Source EDA

Open-source EDA tools allow design-space exploration (DSE) to move beyond public knobs and into bounded source-level mechanisms inside staged optimizers. We present ReviewDSE, a protected white-box DSE framework that explores such mechanisms for a target design. ReviewDSE evaluates complete source candidates under a protected evaluator and records reusable search knowledge as reviewed mechanism-level evidence. It first constructs method evidence and source-start branches from calibration designs, then uses these fixed warm-start products to initialize target-case exploration under Teacher review and full-flow validation. We instantiate ReviewDSE on OpenROAD detailed placement as a representative staged open-source EDA optimizer. Across nine target tasks, ReviewDSE reduces final post-DPL half-perimeter wirelength (HPWL) by 1.78% on average under a 2$\times$ runtime gate, compared with 0.38% for public-knob black-box DSE. A runtime-aware ReviewDSE selection retains a 1.68% reduction at 1.11$\times$ runtime, and full-flow review exposes stage-composability failures while source-mechanism exploration repairs hard cut-row legality failures.