Global and Local Attention-based Inception U-Net for Static IR Drop Prediction

Abstract: Static IR drop analysis is a fundamental and critical task in chip design since the IR drop will significantly affect the design's functionality, performance, and reliability. However, the process of IR drop analysis can be time-consuming, potentially taking several hours. Therefore, a fast and accurate IR drop prediction is paramount for reducing the overall time invested in chip design. In this paper, we propose a global and local attention-based Inception U-Net for static IR drop prediction. Our U-Net incorporates the Transformer, CBAM, and Inception architectures to enhance its feature capture capability at different scales and improve the accuracy of predicted IR drop. Moreover, we propose 4 new features, which enhance our model with richer information. Finally, to balance the sampling probabilities across different regions in one design, we propose a series of novel data spatial adjustment techniques, with each batch randomly selecting one of them during training. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed algorithm can achieve the best results among the winning teams of the ICCAD 2023 contest and the state-of-the-art algorithms.