{"ID":6537620,"CreatedAt":"2026-07-14T02:54:43.516908796Z","UpdatedAt":"2026-07-15T03:28:55.185153975Z","DeletedAt":null,"paper_url":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.11294","arxiv_id":"2607.11294","title":"From Tool Invocation to Source-Mechanism Exploration: Protected White-Box DSE for Open-Source EDA","abstract":"Open-source EDA tools allow design-space exploration (DSE) to move beyond public knobs and into bounded source-level mechanisms inside staged optimizers. We present ReviewDSE, a protected white-box DSE framework that explores such mechanisms for a target design. ReviewDSE evaluates complete source candidates under a protected evaluator and records reusable search knowledge as reviewed mechanism-level evidence. It first constructs method evidence and source-start branches from calibration designs, then uses these fixed warm-start products to initialize target-case exploration under Teacher review and full-flow validation. We instantiate ReviewDSE on OpenROAD detailed placement as a representative staged open-source EDA optimizer. Across nine target tasks, ReviewDSE reduces final post-DPL half-perimeter wirelength (HPWL) by 1.78\\% on average under a 2$\\times$ runtime gate, compared with 0.38\\% for public-knob black-box DSE. A runtime-aware ReviewDSE selection retains a 1.68\\% reduction at 1.11$\\times$ runtime, and full-flow review exposes stage-composability failures while source-mechanism exploration repairs hard cut-row legality failures.","short_abstract":"Open-source EDA tools allow design-space exploration (DSE) to move beyond public knobs and into bounded source-level mechanisms inside staged optimizers. We present ReviewDSE, a protected white-box DSE framework that explores such mechanisms for a target design. ReviewDSE evaluates complete source candidates under a pr...","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.11294","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2607.11294v1","authors":"[\"Zhiyu Zheng\",\"Yiming Du\",\"Ziyi Wang\",\"Zhiang Wang\"]","published":"2026-07-13T09:11:53Z","proceeding":"cs.AR","tasks":"[\"cs.AR\"]","methods":"[\"LoRA\"]","has_code":false}