Design Rule Violation Prediction at Sub-10-nm Process Nodes Using Customized Convolutional Networks

As the semiconductor process technology advances into sub-10-nm regime, cell pin accessibility, which is a complex joint effect from the pin shape and nearby blockages, becomes a main cause for design rule violations (DRVs). Therefore, a machine-learning model for DRV prediction needs to consider both very high-resolution pin shape patterns and low-resolution layout information as input features. A new convolutional neural network technique, J-Net, is introduced for the prediction with mixed resolution features. This is a customized architecture that is flexible for handling various input and output resolution requirements. It can be applied at placement stage without using global routing information. This technique is evaluated on 12 industrial designs at a 7-nm technology node. The results show that the J-Net-based binary classifier can improve the true positive rate by 37%, 40%, and 7%, respectively, compared to extensions of three recent works, with similar false positive rates.