Deep H-GCN: Fast Analog IC Aging-Induced Degradation Estimation
Tinghuan Chen, Qi Sun, Canhui Zhan, Changze Liu, Huatao Yu, Bei Yu
Abstract
With continued scaling, the transistor aging induced by hot carrier injection (HCI) and bias temperature instability (BTI) causes an increasing failure of nanometer-scale integrated circuits (ICs). Compared to digital ICs, analog ICs are more susceptible to aging effects. The industrial large-scale analog ICs bring grand challenges in the efficiency of aging verification. In this article, we propose a heterogeneous graph convolutional network (H-GCN) to fast estimate aging-induced transistor degradation in analog ICs. To characterize the multityped devices and connection pins, a heterogeneous directed multigraph is adopted to efficiently represent the topology of analog ICs. A latent space mapping method is used to transform the feature vector of all typed devices into a unified latent space. We further extend the proposed H-GCN to be a deep version via initial residual connections and identity mappings. The extended deep H-GCN can extract information from multihop devices without an oversmoothing issue. A probability-based neighborhood sampling method on the bipartite graph is adopted to ease the model training on large-scale graphs and achieve good scalability. Experiments on very advanced 5-nm industrial benchmarks show that, compared to traditional graph learning methods and static aging reliability simulations by an industrial design-for-reliability (DFR) tool, the proposed deep H-GCN can achieve more accurate estimations of aging-induced transistor degradation. Compared to the dynamic and static aging reliability simulations, our extended deep H-GCN, on average, can achieve <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$241\times $ </tex-math></inline-formula> and <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$39\times $ </tex-math></inline-formula> speedup, respectively.