The-OpenROAD-Project / The-OpenROAD-Project/OpenROAD
Display MPL cluster results
@jorge-ferreira-pii is already working on this.
Since Aug 1, 2026.
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Description
Description
Right now, there is no way to determine the quality of the soft-macro placement during MPL. The cells are pre-placed in clusters for GPL, but then before and after GPL there is no way to highlight the cell clusters.
Doing this with a script to highlight each instance, even using some smart wildcards, results in a TCL script that is too long and cannot finish do to the GUI refresh rate using commands like this:
select -name "i_frontend/i_fetch_fifo.i_fifo_v3.usage_o\\\[*" -type Inst -highlight 0
Suggested Solution
There are a few possible solutions:
- Allow highlighting in batch from a file with a list of names/regexes.
- Add properties to the ODB output (but probably make it optional since most people won't use it)
Additional Context
The goal is to make plots like this from the Hier-RTLMP paper:
Contributor guide
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