A post-routing stage IR drop reduction technique with less routing resources

Abstract

IR Drop turned into a significant problem due to faster switching frequencies and device density through power distribution network. In a backend design flow, Power Delivery Networks are drawn at initial stages. The Power delivery improvement techniques available are applicable at PNR stages and less at ECO i.e. Post routing stages. Also, Power delivery improvement techniques generally widen the stripes or thicken the stripes using the available space, which may lead to reducing the routing resources for other design techniques. To deal with these problems, paper contains the techniques to be implemented at sign off stage. The technique2 is utilized to choose the effective locales to upgrade the power rail connectivity. They improve the IR drop with less usage of routing resources. These techniques are implemented and checked using IC Compiler and Red Hawk Explorer tools. In the Red Hawk Explorer tool reports, the experimental results demonstrate that the proposed approach can enhance the most noticeably awful IR-drop from 23.57mv (2.36%) to 10.02mv(1%) (i.e. 57.8% improvement) at sign-off stage, where the ECO stripe width is 7.5 times the default width.