# WACA-UNet: Weakness-Aware Channel Attention for Static IR Drop Prediction in Integrated Circuit Design

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.19197 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.19197/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 15 of its 28 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 25 Jul 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 15 of 15)

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- [SGDR: Stochastic Gradient Descent with Warm Restarts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.03983/) (2016)
- [Squeeze-and-Excitation Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.01507/) (2017)
- [CBAM: Convolutional Block Attention Module](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.06521/) (2018)
- [Attention U-Net: Learning Where to Look for the Pancreas](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.03999/) (2018)
- [ConvNeXt V2: Co-designing and Scaling ConvNets with Masked Autoencoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.00808/) (2023)
- [Focal Frequency Loss for Image Reconstruction and Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.12821/) (2020)
- [PowerNet: Transferable Dynamic IR Drop Estimation via Maximum Convolutional Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.13494/) (2020)
- [Thermal and IR Drop Analysis Using Convolutional Encoder-Decoder Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.09009/) (2020)
- [PDNNet: PDN-Aware GNN-CNN Heterogeneous Network for Dynamic IR Drop Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.18569/) (2024)
- [OpeNPDN: A Neural-network-based Framework for Power Delivery Network Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.14184/) (2021)
- [Global and Local Attention-based Inception U-Net for Static IR Drop Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.06541/) (2024)
- [CFIRSTNET: Comprehensive Features for Static IR Drop Estimation with Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.12168/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Accurate spatial prediction of power integrity issues, such as IR drop, is critical for reliable VLSI design. However, traditional simulation-based solvers are computationally expensive and difficult to scale. We address this challenge by reformulating IR drop estimation as a pixel-wise regression task on heterogeneous multi-channel physical maps derived from circuit layouts. Prior learning-based methods treat all input layers (e.g., metal, via, and current maps) equally, ignoring their varying importance to prediction accuracy. To tackle this, we propose a novel Weakness-Aware Channel Attention (WACA) mechanism, which recursively enhances weak feature channels while suppressing over-dominant ones through a two-stage gating strategy. Integrated into a ConvNeXtV2-based attention U-Net, our approach enables adaptive and balanced feature representation. On the public ICCAD-2023 benchmark, our method outperforms the ICCAD-2023 contest winner by reducing mean absolute error by 61.1% and improving F1-score by 71.0%. These results demonstrate that channel-wise heterogeneity is a key inductive bias in physical layout analysis for VLSI.