[PhaseLockk]

The skills needed to create a chip and the skills needed to create chip design software are fundamentally different. Of all the engineers I've met who work on the physical implementation and timing closure of digital chips, only a very limited number would have any hope of creating some sort of place and route tool, and it would be rudimentary and inefficient. They are not expert programmers.

[rektide]

Huge part of why OpenROAD (and as this article.indicates, nvidia) are so focused on machine learning! Because the nitty gritty of chip design has abundant gnarly problems requiring deep deep expertise. Deploying software engineers is hard. But building ml is kind of our bag!

There's another nice upstart opensource project with even fancier ml placememt systems that spawned recently out of the openroad world, dreamplace, https://github.com/limbo018/DREAMPlace

This is just gonna get more & more biased against a couple super smart engineers who we've deeply entrusted to divine inner the workings of the chips on, & become increasingly a set of better modelled problems that we can machine learningly optimize.