PhysEDA: Physics-Aware Learning Framework for Efficient EDA With Manhattan Distance Decay

Electronic design automation (EDA) addresses placement, routing, timing analysis, and power-integrity verification for integrated circuits. Learning methods – attention (Transformer) and reinforcement learning (RL) – have recently emerged on EDA tasks, yet face two common bottlenecks: vanilla attention’s quadratic complexity limits scaling, and data-scarce models overfit statistical noise and amplify weak long-range correlations against the underlying physics. We observe that EDA tasks share a physical prior – pairwise electrical and routing interactions decay exponentially along Manhattan distance – and integrate it as a unified inductive bias into both architecture and training. We propose PhysEDA, comprising two components Physics-Structured Linear Attention (PSLA) folds the separable Manhattan decay into the linear-attention kernel as a multiplicative bias, reducing complexity from quadratic to linear; Potential-Based Reward Shaping (PBRS) constructs a physical potential from the same kernel, providing dense reward signal under sparse RL while preserving the optimal policy via the policy-invariance theorem. Across three EDA scenarios – decoupling-capacitor placement, macro placement, and IR-drop prediction – PhysEDA improves zero-shot cross-scale transfer by 56.8% and achieves 14x inference speedup with 98.5% memory savings on 100x100 grids; PBRS adds another 10.8% in sparse-reward DPP.