Si-GT: Fast Interconnect Signal Integrity Analysis For Integrated Circuit Design Via Graph Transformers

By Yuting Hu ¹, Tarek Mohamed ², Chenhui Xu ¹, Hua Xiang ³, Hussam Amrouch ², Gi-Joon Nam ³, Jinjun Xiong ^1
1 University at Buffalo, Buffalo, NY, USA
² University of Stuttgart, Stuttgart, Germany
³ IBM Research, Yorktown Heights, NY, USA

Abstract

Signal integrity issues present significant challenges in modern integrated circuit (IC) design, as crosstalk-induced delay variation and transient glitches caused by capacitive coupling among interconnects can severely impact IC functional correctness. Although circuit simulators like SPICE can deliver accurate signal integrity analysis, their computational cost becomes prohibitive for large-scale designs. In this paper, we propose Si-GT, a novel transformer-based model for fast and accurate signal integrity analysis in IC interconnects. Our model elaborates three key designs: (1) virtual NET token to encode net-specific signal characteristics and serve as net-wise representation, (2) mesh pattern encoding to embed high-order mesh structures at each node while distinguishing uncoupled wire segments, and (3) intra-inter net (IIN) attention mechanism to capture structures of signal propagation path and coupling connections. To support model training and evaluation, we construct the first interconnect signal integrity dataset comprising 200k delay examples and 187k glitch examples using SPICE simulations as the golden reference. Our experiments show that our Si-GT surpasses state-of-the-art graph neural network and graph transformer baselines with substantially reduced computation compared to SPICE, offering a scalable and effective solution for interconnect signal integrity analysis in IC design verification. We release the code, model, and datasets at https://github.com/xlab-ub/Si-GT

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