TraceFormer: S-parameter Prediction Framework for PCB Traces based on Graph Transformer

Signal integrity becomes more critical to modern digital systems such as solid-state drives due to their high-speed operation. However, one of the challenges in signal integrity analysis is S-parameter modeling process for printed circuit boards (PCB). Due to increasing PCB design complexity, existing numerical methods take too long to solve governing equations for S-parameters. To overcome the issue, we present a novel deep learning framework, TraceFormer, to predict S-parameters of PCB traces. Our framework constructs a graph from PCB traces and tokenizes trace segments with geometric and topological information. A transformer encoder produces PCB representations from the tokens, followed by extraction networks which predict four different types of complex-valued S-parameters together. TraceFormer achieved above 0.99 R-squared score up to 15GHz for 4-port PCB designs, resulting in less than 3.1% and 4.2% errors in terms of the eye diagram's width and height, respectively.