End-to-End Neural Modeling of EM Response and Design Performance for Free-Form RFIC Passives

Abstract

Passive matching networks are critical components in radio-frequency integrated circuits (RFICs), but their design is bottlenecked by expensive finite-difference-based electromagnetic (EM) simulation. We propose an end-to-end neural framework for free-form RFIC passives that predicts both EM response and downstream design performance under varying frequency and circuit contexts, combining a frequency-conditioned neural simulator with a circuit-conditioned neural solver. To improve design performance prediction, the simulator outputs a neural EM response consisting of both the explicit EM response and a complementary response, together with a dependence regularizer that encourages the two responses to capture orthogonal information. To evaluate the proposed framework, we construct a large-scale dataset of free-form passive layouts, synthesized from both expert-designed contours and random paths. Our 21M-parameter model achieves high accuracy across a broad frequency range, circuit contexts and passive matching settings, with $R^2>0.98$ for almost all targets, while providing orders-of-magnitude faster evaluation than traditional EM simulation. Code available at https://github.com/ETH-IDEAS/RFIC-NeuralSim.