A Deep Learning-Based Method for Heat Source Layout Inverse Design

Heat source layout design is an effective technique to enhance the thermal performance in the whole system, which has become a vital part in many engineering fields, e.g. satellite layout design and integrated circuit design. Traditionally, the optimal design is obtained by searching the design space with the optimization technique which repeatedly runs the thermal simulation to compare the performance of each scheme. Due to the extremely large computational burden with this method, the optimization is greatly limited. To overcome the challenge, heat source layout inverse design (HSLID) is proposed in this article to directly generate the layout scheme with the given thermal performance requirement. A novel method for heat source layout inverse design, denoted as SAR-HSLID, is proposed based on the recently deep learning technique, Show Attend and Read (SAR) model. Firstly, regarding the mapping from the required temperature field to layout scheme as an image-to-location task, this article introduces SAR model, which is good at sequence predicting, to generate the layout scheme. The trained SAR is capable of learning the underlying physics of the design problem, thus can efficiently predict the design under given requirement without any physical simulation. Secondly, to ensure that the designed heat source layout exactly satisfies the input temperature field requirement, based on the layout predicted by SAR, we further utilize a simple but efficient optimization process to conduct few post-processing. Finally, a heat source layout inverse design task in a typical two-dimensional heat conduction problem is investigated to demonstrate the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed method.