Optimal placement of power supply pads and pins

• Published in: 2004 41st Conference Design Automation pp. 165 - 170
• Main Authors: Zhao, Min, Fu, Yuhong, Zolotov, Vladimir, Sundareswaran, Savithri, Panda, Rajendran
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Published: New York, NY, USA ACM 07.06.2004; IEEE; Association for Computing Machinery
• Series: ACM Conferences
• Subjects: Applied sciences; Atherosclerosis; Circuit properties; Circuits; Design. Technologies. Operation analysis. Testing; Electric, optical and optoelectronic circuits; Electronic circuits; Electronic equipment and fabrication. Passive components, printed wiring boards, connectics; Electronics; Exact sciences and technology; Hardware > Electronic design automation > Physical design (EDA); Integrated circuits; Network-on-a-chip; Pins; Power grids; Power supplies; Power systems; Regulators; Semiconductor electronics. Microelectronics. Optoelectronics. Solid state devices; Signal convertors; Very large scale integration; Voltage; pad placement; pad optimization; Performance evaluation; High performance; VLSI circuit; Circuit design; Integrated circuit; Heuristic method; Mixed integer programming; Power supply; Low-power electronics; Computer aided design; Voltage regulators
• ISBN: 1581138288; 9781581138283; 1511838288
• ISSN: 0738-100X
• DOI: 10.1145/996566.996615

Power delivery networks of VLSI chips require adequate input supply connections to ensure reliable performance. This paper addresses the problem of finding an optimum set of pads, pins, and on-chip voltage regulators, and their placement in a given power supply network, subject to constraints on the voltage drops in the network and maximum currents through the pads, pins and regulators. The problem is modeled as a mixed integer linear program using macromodeling techniques and several heuristic techniques are proposed to make the problem tractable. The effectiveness of the proposed techniques is demonstrated on several real chips and memories used in low-power and high-performance applications.