Hongnan Cheng

and 2 more

The chip industry is essential for national security and economic development, with integrated circuit (IC) reverse engineering playing a vital role in analyzing chip structures. This process involves several steps, including layer-by-layer image acquisition using scanning electron microscopy (SEM), device identification, gate net extraction, and function inference. Segmenting electrical components and metal lines from IC images is crucial for these analyses. However, traditional image segmentation methods often fail to handle the complex and variable conditions of IC images due to insufficient expert knowledge. This study introduces an improved approach, using the UNet ++ architecture and effentnet-b7 as the encoder, called the E- UNet++ model. A post-processing denoising stage is added that contains Hough circle detection and median filtering for extracting metal lines and perforations in IC images. The primary contributions of this method are: (1) it enables fully automatic detection of metal lines and vias without manual intervention, and (2) it combines E-UNet++, Hough circle detection, and median filtering in a hybrid approach to accurately locate metal lines and vias. Experimental results on over ten thousand IC images, each measuring 1024×1024 and provided by a company, show that training with just 393 images allows the E-UNet++ model to effectively segment metal lines and vias. The average intersection over union (mIoU) is 98.09% and the mean pixel accuracy (MPA) is 99.06%, surpassing the performance of existing methods.