Proceedings

ACCFormer: Predicting Analog Circuit Performance Metrics via Topology-Aware Transformers

Download BibTeX Cite

Proceedings of the Thirty-Fifth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence. AI4Tech: AI Enabling Technologies. Pages 6471-6479.

https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2026/720

Abstract

Reusing and migrating analog circuit intellectual property (IP) across process nodes poses a significant challenge in modern chip design. Efficient and generalizable circuit performance prediction methods for analog circuits are crucial to achieving this goal. Current data-driven approaches typically rely on manually designed features, which perform poorly on unseen circuit architectures and struggle to model the inherent structural relationships within analog designs. To address these challenges, we propose ACCFormer, a novel topology-aware Transformer framework for predicting performance metrics of analog circuit. Our model combines device parameters with connectivity data to learn topology-aware representations, followed by a performance-oriented cross-attention mechanism where trainable metric queries adaptively focus on the most critical devices for each target parameter. Validated across different process nodes, our model achieves state-of-the-art prediction accuracy and demonstrates strong cross-process adaptability, highlighting its potential to accelerate IP reuse and reduce design cycles.

  1. [Brunoli et al., 2002] Mike Brunoli, Masao Hotta, Felicia James, Rudy Koch, Roy McGuffin, and Andrew J Moore. Analog intellectual property: now? or never? In Proceed- ings of the 39th annual Design Automation Conference, pages 181-182, 2002.
  2. [Catanzaro et al., 2008] Bryan Catanzaro, Kurt Keutzer, and Bor-Yiing Su. Parallelizing cad: A timely research agenda for eda. In Proceedings of the 45th annual Design Au- tomation Conference, pages 12-17, 2008.
  3. [Chen et al., 2020] Hao Chen, Mingjie Liu, Biying Xu, Keren Zhu, Xiyuan Tang, Shaolan Li, Yibo Lin, Nan Sun, and David Z Pan. Magical: An open-source fully auto- mated analog ic layout system from netlist to gdsii. IEEE Design & Test, 38(2):19-26, 2020.
  4. [Crossley et al., 2013] John Crossley, Alberto Puggelli, H-P Le, B Yang, R Nancollas, Kwangmo Jung, Lingkai Kong, Nathan Narevsky, Yue Lu, Nicholas Sutardja, et al. Bag: A designer-oriented integrated framework for the devel- opment of ams circuit generators. In 2013 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Computer-Aided Design (IC- CAD), pages 74-81. IEEE, 2013.
  5. [Dhar et al., 2020] Tonmoy Dhar, Kishor Kunal, Yaguang Li, Meghna Madhusudan, Jitesh Poojary, Arvind K Sharma, Wenbin Xu, Steven M Burns, Ramesh Harjani, Jiang Hu, et al. Align: A system for automating analog layout. IEEE Design & Test, 38(2):8-18, 2020.
  6. [El Sayed et al., 2025] Ziad El Sayed, Zeng Wang, Hana Selmani, Johann Knechtel, Ozgur Sinanoglu, and Lilas Al- rahis. Graph neural networks for integrated circuit design, reliability, and security: Survey and tool. ACM Computing Surveys, 58(4):1-44, 2025.
  7. [Goldie and Mirhoseini, 2024] Anna Goldie and Azalia Mirhoseini. How AlphaChip transformed computer chip design, sep 2024.
  8. [Hakhamaneshi et al., 2019] Kourosh Hakhamaneshi, Nick Werblun, Pieter Abbeel, and Vladimir Stojanović. Bagnet: Berkeley analog generator with layout optimizer boosted with deep neural networks. In 2019 IEEE/ACM Interna- tional Conference on Computer-Aided Design (ICCAD), pages 1-8. IEEE, 2019.
  9. [Huang et al., 2021] Guyue Huang, Jingbo Hu, Yifan He, Jialong Liu, Mingyuan Ma, Zhaoyang Shen, Juejian Wu, Yuanfan Xu, Hengrui Zhang, Kai Zhong, et al. Machine learning for electronic design automation: A survey. ACM Transactions on Design Automation of Electronic Systems (TODAES), 26(5):1-46, 2021.
  10. [Ji et al., 2019] Zhigang Ji, Haibao Chen, and Xiuyan Li. Design for reliability with the advanced integrated circuit (ic) technology: challenges and opportunities. Science China. Information Sciences, 62(12):226401, 2019.
  11. [Kahng and Koushanfar, 2015] Andrew B Kahng and Fari- naz Koushanfar. Evolving eda beyond its e-roots: an overview. In 2015 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Computer-Aided Design (ICCAD), pages 247-254. IEEE, 2015.
  12. [Kunal et al., 2019] Kishor Kunal, Meghna Madhusudan, Arvind K Sharma, Wenbin Xu, Steven M Burns, Ramesh Harjani, Jiang Hu, Desmond A Kirkpatrick, and Sachin S Sapatnekar. Align: Open-source analog layout automation from the ground up. In Proceedings of the 56th Annual Design Automation Conference 2019, pages 1-4, 2019.
  13. Deepak Kumar Lnu. Pcie verification at high speeds: Challenges, solutions, and future trends. [Markov, 2023]
  14. Igor L Markov. The false dawn: Reevaluat- ing google's reinforcement learning for chip macro place- ment. arXiv preprint arXiv:2306.09633, 2023.
  15. [Mehradfar et al., 2025] Asal Mehradfar, Xuzhe Zhao, Yilun Huang, Emir Ceyani, Yankai Yang, Shihao Han, Hamidreza Aghasi, and Salman Avestimehr. Falcon: An ml framework for fully automated layout-constrained ana- log circuit design. arXiv preprint arXiv:2505.21923, 2025.
  16. [Metcalfe, 2021] Rod Metcalfe. Machine learning-driven full-flow chip design automation. Accessed: Mar, 1:2024, 2021.
  17. [Mirhoseini et al., 2020] Azalia Mirhoseini, Anna Goldie, Mustafa Yazgan, Joe Jiang, Ebrahim Songhori, Shen Wang, Young-Joon Lee, Eric Johnson, Omkar Pathak, Sungmin Bae, et al. Chip placement with deep reinforce- ment learning. arXiv preprint arXiv:2004.10746, 2020.
  18. [Mirhoseini et al., 2021] Azalia Mirhoseini, Anna Goldie, Mustafa Yazgan, Joe Wenjie Jiang, Ebrahim Songhori, Shen Wang, Young-Joon Lee, Eric Johnson, Omkar Pathak, Azade Nova, et al. A graph placement method- ology for fast chip design. Nature, 594(7862):207-212, 2021.
  19. [Neamen, 2007] Donald A Neamen. Microelectronics: cir- cuit analysis and design, volume 43. McGraw-Hill New York, 2007.
  20. [Nguyen et al., 2024] Chi Lan Phuong Nguyen, Quyet Van Hoang, An Hai Lam Tran, Khoa Dac Tran, Nghia Trong Tran, Takafumi Noguchi, James David, So Katogi, Yukie Endo, and Koji Hirakimoto. Enhancing functional verification productivity through an automated workflow with machine learning based tools. In 2024 9th International Conference on Integrated Circuits, Design, and Verification (ICDV), pages 166-170. IEEE, 2024.
  21. [Razavi, 2005] Behzad Razavi. Design of analog CMOS in- tegrated circuits. 2005.
  22. [Razavi, 2021] Behzad Razavi. Fundamentals of microelec- tronics. John Wiley & Sons, 2021.
  23. [Reddy, 2024] Taruna Reddy. Reducing manual effort and achieving better chip verification coverage with ai and for- mal techniques, sep 2024.
  24. [Reis, 2022] Ricardo Augusto Da Luz Reis. Eda: Overview and some trends. Journal of Integrated Circuits and Sys- tems, 17(3):1-10, 2022.
  25. [Scheffer et al., 2018] Louis Scheffer, Luciano Lavagno, and Grant Martin. EDA for IC system design, verification, and testing. CRC press, 2018.
  26. [Shin, 2023] Youngsoo Shin. Ai-eda: Toward a holistic ap- proach to ai-powered eda. In 2023 ACM/IEEE 5th Work- shop on Machine Learning for CAD (MLCAD), pages 1-3. IEEE, 2023.
  27. [Synopsys Inc., 2026] Synopsys Inc. Synopsys ASO.ai: Un- leashing the power of AI to analog design, 2026. Ac- cessed: 2026-01-17.
  28. [Vaswani et al., 2017] Ashish Vaswani, Noam Shazeer, Niki Parmar, Jakob Uszkoreit, Llion Jones, Aidan N Gomez, Łukasz Kaiser, and Illia Polosukhin. Attention is all you need. Advances in neural information processing systems, 30, 2017.
  29. [Venkatachar, 2021] Arun Venkatachar. Confluence of ai/ml with eda and software engineering. In 2021 22nd Interna- tional Symposium on Quality Electronic Design (ISQED), pages 13-15. IEEE, 2021.
  30. [Verma, 2024] Piyush Verma. Dso. ai-a distributed system to optimize physical design flows. In Proceedings of the 2024 International Symposium on Physical Design, pages 115-116, 2024.
  31. [Wu and Savidis, 2022] Zhengfeng Wu and Ioannis Savidis. Transfer learning for reuse of analog circuit sizing mod- els across technology nodes. In 2022 IEEE International Symposium on Circuits and Systems (ISCAS), pages 1033- 1037. IEEE, 2022.
  32. [Wu et al., 2022] Nan Wu, Yuan Xie, and Cong Hao. Ai- assisted synthesis in next generation eda: Promises, chal- lenges, and prospects. In 2022 IEEE 40th International Conference on Computer Design (ICCD), pages 207-214. IEEE, 2022.
  33. [Wu et al., 2024] Haoyuan Wu, Zhuolun He, Xinyun Zhang, Xufeng Yao, Su Zheng, Haisheng Zheng, and Bei Yu. Chateda: A large language model powered autonomous agent for eda. IEEE Transactions on Computer-Aided Design of Integrated Circuits and Systems, 43(10):3184- 3197, 2024.
  34. [Xu et al., 2019] Biying Xu, Keren Zhu, Mingjie Liu, Yibo Lin, Shaolan Li, Xiyuan Tang, Nan Sun, and David Z Pan. Magical: Toward fully automated analog ic layout leverag- ing human and machine intelligence. In 2019 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Computer-Aided Design (IC- CAD), pages 1-8. IEEE, 2019.
  35. [Yu, 2023] Bei Yu. Machine learning in eda: When and how. In 2023 ACM/IEEE 5th Workshop on Machine Learning for CAD (MLCAD), pages 1-6. IEEE, 2023.
  36. [Zadeh and Elamien, 2025] Danial Noori Zadeh and Mo- hamed B Elamien. Generative ai for analog integrated circuit design: Methodologies and applications. IEEE Ac- cess, 2025.
  37. [Zang et al., 2025] Zelin Zang, Yuhang Song, Bingo Wing- Kuen Ling, Aili Wang, and Fuji Yang. The dawn of agentic eda: A survey of autonomous digital chip design. arXiv preprint arXiv:2512.23189, 2025.

References were extracted automatically from the PDF and may contain errors.

Welcome Future Conferences AI Journal Division IJCAI Proceedings About IJCAI IJCAI Awards