English

LEAP: A Self-Supervised Per-Cycle Toggle Propagation Model Supports Fast, Transferable, and Early Analysis of Layout Power

Hardware Architecture 2026-08-03 v1

Abstract

Accurate power analysis is critical in VLSI design, as it directly impacts power optimization strategies. However, traditional approaches are often hindered by the substantial runtime required for per-cycle toggle propagation in the netlist, which propagates register toggle information through combinational logic. To address this, we propose LEAP, the first work to enable per-cycle toggle propagation prediction with both high accuracy and efficiency. This is achieved through a novel, linear-complexity graph transformer capable of simulating toggle propagation, along with specially designed self-supervised pre-training tasks that enable the model to capture circuit structure and functionality. LEAP achieves a 7.6x speedup over the EDA tool in toggle propagation, and attains a near-perfect area under the Precision-Recall curve (PR-AUC) of 0.99 for prediction results. Moreover, LEAP can be seamlessly integrated with other machine learning based power models into LEAP-Power. This integration enables precise per-cycle layout power prediction directly from post-synthesis netlists, achieving a mean absolute percentage error(MAPE) of only 4.55%. By bypassing toggle propagation in the netlist, LEAP-Power delivers substantial runtime gains, running 5.3x faster than the model without LEAP.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2608.01946,
  title  = {LEAP: A Self-Supervised Per-Cycle Toggle Propagation Model Supports Fast, Transferable, and Early Analysis of Layout Power},
  author = {Wenkai Li and Yuchao Wu and Ziyan Guo and Yao Lu and Wenji Fang and Mengming Li and Zhiyao Xie},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2608.01946},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

Accepted by Design Automation Conference (DAC), 2026