The task
Adjust synthesis and place-and-route constraints on one block until it closes timing at the target frequency.
Proposed by PIG-DemoRank 12 of 12Not in the first set
Semiconductor PPA Closure
Who it is for
VP of Silicon Engineering
Timing closure is six weeks of a senior engineer’s life per tape-out, and we do it again next tape-out.
The reward
The signoff report is the reward: worst negative slack, total negative slack, area, leakage power. Numbers the tool prints. No rubric, no judge, no human in the scoring loop.
The counterweight
Hitting frequency by spending area or power is priced into the same objective, and a run that fails design-rule checks scores nothing however good its timing looks.
The counterweight is the part worth arguing about. A reward with nothing pulling against it is a target, and a target is what a model learns to hit instead of doing the job.
Where this stops
The most rigorous reward on this page and the worst demo on it. Signoff needs licensed EDA tools and hours of compute for a single rollout, and none of that fits in a browser tab. We are listing it because it is where the argument is strongest, and we are telling you we are not building it.
What exists today
Nothing. There is no environment for this vertical, no recorded run, and no number. It is a proposal, written to the same shape as the one that is built so you can judge it on the same terms.
The environment that does exist is Word Five. It is a word game, and it is deliberately not one of these twelve: it is there to show the machinery, not to imply we have built yours.