Waveform relaxation with overlapping based partitioning for fast transient simulation of package/board power distribution networks

Abstract

Modeling of power distribution networks in electronic packages requires the two dimensional discretization of the distributed power/ground planes which can be computationally expensive. Recently, the waveform relaxation algorithm has been proposed for fast transient simulation of power/ground planes. However, due to the strong coupling of each node in a two dimensional (2D) physical space, the relaxation iterations exhibit slow convergence and special techniques need to be adopted to ensure efficient convergence. In this work, a novel waveform relaxation algorithm based on physically partitioning the power/ground plane into smaller overlapping subcircuits is presented. The overlap between the subcircuits provides greater exchange of information per iteration leading to accelerated convergence of the waveform relaxation algorithm. A numerical example has been provided to illustrate the validity of the proposed algorithm over full SPICE simulations.