A Power Delivery Network and Cell Placement Aware IR-Drop Mitigation Technique: Harvesting Unused Timing Slacks to Schedule Useful Skews

Abstract

This paper, presents a novel technique for reducing the intensity of IR hot-spots by leveraging the unused timing slacks to schedule useful skews. The peak current minimization problem is reformulated into a collection of smaller problems of reducing the peak current of each via-stack in the on-chip Power Delivery Network (PDN). In addition to timing information, it considers the PDN and cell placement information while scheduling the clock arrival times. Hence, while reducing the peak current, it effectively reduces the intensity the IR hot- spots. Application of the proposed solution to a selected number of IWLS benchmarks reduces the peak IR-drop by ±35%, and peak current by ±37%.