Faster Region-Based Hotspot Detection

As the circuit feature size continuously shrinks down, hotspot detection has become a more challenging problem in modern design for manufacturability flows. Developed deep learning techniques have recently shown their superiorities on hotspot detection tasks. However, existing hotspot detectors can only handle defect detection from one small layout clip each time, thus, may be very time-consuming when dealing with a large full-chip layout. In this article, we develop a new end-to-end framework that can detect multiple hotspots in a large region at a time and promise a better hotspot detection performance. We design a joint auto-encoder and inception module for efficient feature extraction. A two-stage classification and regression framework is designed to detect hotspot with progressive accurate localization, which provides a promising performance improvement. Experimental results show that our framework enables a significant speed improvement over existing methods with higher accuracy and fewer false alarms.