Improving power delivery network design by practical methodologies

There are many works on the power network design and prototyping for digital designs, however some usual and practical design concerns are not addressed. In this work, we present a realistic power network design methodology without IR violation certified by state-of-the-art commercial tool. Our work integrates analysis, optimization and synthesis of power network. In particular, we consider thermal effect and power pad's positions during the prototyping of power network. A scenario in placement regarding the violation of design rules is considered and resolved by maximum flow algorithm at the same stage. After the synthesis of initial power network, we generate a sensitivity matrix which is correlated with nodal voltage and resistances of net and via in metal layers. Furthermore, a Sequential Linear Programming(SLP) will be applied to adjust the sensitivity matrix iteratively until the IR drop constraint is satisfied. Our work is experimented on a real design in TSMC 65nm LP process, and the result validates our framework that the IR-Drop can be reduced to 2% of supply voltage.