Presentation

DescriptionAggressive technology scaling allows the increase of operation frequency and power density per area. As a result, the higher localized current demanding leads the excessive Dynamic Voltage Drop (DVD) which may affects the circuit function or performance. To relieve DVD, the skillful engineer uses the comprehensive set of techniques, which modifies resistance or current demanding. However, they are mostly manual and ambiguous work since it is difficult to define root causes of DVD and consider timing QOR simultaneously. To remedy this problem, we propose a novel automated timing-aware DVD ECO flow. The following two functions play a key role in the flow. First, we classifies victims and aggressors of DVD and find the candidates of DVD ECO among them. Second, we estimate the DVD impact caused by the change of circuit with consideration of timing. With these techniques, our flow performs swapping of Vth and cell size of candidates and feedback to Place and route tool. Through our experimental results, the total number of violation counts decreased by 78.8%, and the worst DVD decreased by 16.1%. Additionally, we also found our proposed flow works to mitigate electromigration effectively. We will continue to work to develop automated EM ECO flow