PRISM-UDE: Physics-Regularized Iterative Symbolic Modeling of 3nm FinFETs via Universal Differential Equation

Abstract

Compact transistor models are the mathematical backbone of circuit simulation. However, at advanced nodes such as 3nm, transport physics becomes too complex for traditional hand-derived equations to capture accurately. Purely data-driven neural surrogates, on the other hand, are numerically unstable inside circuit solvers and offer no physical insight into their own predictions. We introduce PRISM-UDE (Physics-Regularized Iterative Symbolic Modeling via Universal Differential Equations), a framework that embeds a small neural network inside a physics-based transistor model, using the network only to learn the transport behavior that the analytical baseline misses, rather than replacing the physics altogether. Once trained, this neural correction is distilled into a single, interpretable closed-form expression via symbolic regression, making the final model fully analytical and simulator-ready. Applied to a 3nm FinFET benchmark dataset, PRISM-UDE reduces prediction error more than sixfold (70.33% to 11.01%) relative to the standard physics-only baseline. The distilled expression preserves this accuracy almost exactly while eliminating the neural network entirely. We further validate the extracted expression directly inside a SPICE circuit simulator, confirming stable, physically consistent behavior under both static bias sweeps and dynamic switching conditions.