Are Adversarial Perturbations a Showstopper for ML-Based CAD? A Case Study on CNN-Based Lithographic Hotspot Detection

There is substantial interest in the use of ML based techniques throughout the electronic computer-aided design (CAD) flow, particularly those based on deep learning. However, while deep learning methods have surpassed state-of-the-art performance in several applications, they have exhibited intrinsic susceptibility to adversarial perturbations small but deliberate alterations to the input of a neural network, precipitating incorrect predictions. In this paper, we seek to investigate whether adversarial perturbations pose risks to ML-based CAD tools, and if so, how these risks can be mitigated. To this end, we use a motivating case study of lithographic hotspot detection, for which convolutional neural networks (CNN) have shown great promise. In this context, we show the first adversarial perturbation attacks on state-of-the-art CNN-based hotspot detectors; specifically, we show that small (on average 0.5% modified area), functionality preserving and design-constraint satisfying changes to a layout can nonetheless trick a CNN-based hotspot detector into predicting the modified layout as hotspot free (with up to 99.7% success). We propose an adversarial retraining strategy to improve the robustness of CNN-based hotspot detection and show that this strategy significantly improves robustness (by a factor of ~3) against adversarial attacks without compromising classification accuracy.