Thermal and power integrity based power/ground networks optimization

With the increasing power density and heat-dissipation cost of modern VLSI designs, thermal and power integrity has become serious concern. Although the impacts of thermal effects on transistor and interconnect performance are well-studied, the interactions between power-delivery and thermal effects are not clear. As a result, power-delivery design without thermal consideration may cause soft-error, reliability degradation, and even premature chip failures. In this paper, we propose a thermal-aware power-delivery optimization algorithm. By simultaneously considering thermal and power integrity, we are able to achieve high power supply quality and thermal reliability. For a 58×72 mesh as shown in the experimental results, our algorithm shows that the lifetime of the optimized ground network is 9.5 years. Whereas the lifetime of the ground network generated by a traditional method is only 2 years without thermal concern.