Expert-level Leaf Cell Layout Generation via Preference-Optimized LLM

In the field of integrated circuits, leaf cells are the basic units, serving as the fundamental building blocks (e.g., standard cells) that are widely reused in various VLSI designs, forming the basis for more complex circuits. Therefore, the design quality of leaf cell layouts significantly impacts the PPA (Power, Performance, and Area) of the final VLSI designs. To automatically design leaf cell layouts that are close to expert designs, we propose GenLeaf. GenLeaf first utilizes a supervised, performance-aware embedding model to represent layouts and automatically calculate their similarity scores. Since there are expert-designed layouts but no corresponding scripts, we implement Bayesian optimization to generate a layout-script dataset for LLM training. With subsequent supervised fine-tuning and further preference optimization, GenLeaf can generate leaf cell layouts through scripts whose performance closely resembles that designed by human engineers. Experiment results demonstrate that GenLeaf outperforms expert-designed golden layouts across key performance metrics.