Voltage propagation method for 3-D power grid analysis

Power grid analysis is a challenging problem for modern integrated circuits. For 3-D systems fabricated using stacked tiers with TSVs, traditional power grid analysis methods for planar (2-D) circuits do not demonstrate the same performance. An efficient IR drop analysis method for 3-D large-scale circuits, called 3-D voltage propagation method, is proposed in this paper. This method is compared with another widely used power grid analysis method, with preconditioned conjugated gradients. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed method is more efficient for the IR drop analysis of large size 3-D power grids. Speedups between 10× to 20× over the preconditioned conjugated gradients method are shown.