DC IR drop solver for large scale 3D power delivery networks

In this paper, DC IR drop simulation of 3D power delivery network (PDN) based on finite volume method with nonuniform grid is presented. Location-dependent resistivity is taken into account in the finite volume formulation which enables simulation of power delivery network with inhomogeneous resistivity. The generated system equation Yx = b is solved using the conjugate gradient (CG) method with a diagonal pre-conditioner. One large scale 3D integration example is simulated, and the results show that by employing the diagonal pre-conditioner and using the symmetric property of the impedance matrix Y, the conjugate gradient method based DC IR drop solver can solve large 3D DC IR drop problem with more than 10 million unknowns with 3 GB memory.