AgenticPD: A Stage-Aware Agentic Framework for Closed-Loop Physical Design Optimization

Physical design quality-of-results (QoR) optimization is hard and expensive. Choices made at one stage can help or hurt later stages. Each evaluation requires a costly EDA run through the full flow. While existing methods still treat optimization as flat parameter tuning or a LLM-based script generation task, we present AgenticPD, a stage-aware agentic framework for physical design QoR optimization. Instead of re-running the full flow after every trial, AgenticPD is organized around the stage boundaries of the physical design flow, where a Judge Agent navigates the search and stage-specialized agents make local decisions within their own stage using stage-local tools. Additionally, the agent harness in AgenticPD provides structured observations, execution history, and agent context management. Experimental results show that AgenticPD achieves the best timing performance among the evaluated PD tuners while maintaining competitive power and area.