Incremental power network analysis using backward random walks

The process of power network analysis during VLSI chip design is inherently iterative. It is very common for the designer to make many small perturbations to an otherwise complete design, to enhance the design or fix design violations. Considering the size of the modern chips, updating the solution for the changed network can be a computationally intensive task. In this paper we propose an efficient and accurate incremental solver that utilizes the backward random walks to identify the region of influence of the perturbation. The solution of the network is updated for the significantly smaller region only. The proposed algorithm is capable of handling consecutive perturbations without any degradation. The experimental results show speedups of up to 13.7× as compared to a complete solution.