498 research outputs found
PowerPlanningDL: Reliability-Aware Framework for On-Chip Power Grid Design using Deep Learning
With the increase in the complexity of chip designs, VLSI physical design has
become a time-consuming task, which is an iterative design process. Power
planning is that part of the floorplanning in VLSI physical design where power
grid networks are designed in order to provide adequate power to all the
underlying functional blocks. Power planning also requires multiple iterative
steps to create the power grid network while satisfying the allowed worst-case
IR drop and Electromigration (EM) margin. For the first time, this paper
introduces Deep learning (DL)-based framework to approximately predict the
initial design of the power grid network, considering different reliability
constraints. The proposed framework reduces many iterative design steps and
speeds up the total design cycle. Neural Network-based multi-target regression
technique is used to create the DL model. Feature extraction is done, and the
training dataset is generated from the floorplans of some of the power grid
designs extracted from the IBM processor. The DL model is trained using the
generated dataset. The proposed DL-based framework is validated using a new set
of power grid specifications (obtained by perturbing the designs used in the
training phase). The results show that the predicted power grid design is
closer to the original design with minimal prediction error (~2%). The proposed
DL-based approach also improves the design cycle time with a speedup of ~6X for
standard power grid benchmarks.Comment: Published in proceedings of IEEE/ACM Design, Automation and Test in
Europe Conference (DATE) 2020, 6 page
Refueling: Preventing wire degradation due to electromigration
Electromigration is a major source of wire and via failure. Refueling undoes EM for bidirectional wires and power/ground grids-some of a chip's most vulnerable wires. Refueling exploits EM's self-healing effect by balancing the amount of current flowing in both directions of a wire. It can significantly extend a wire's lifetime while reducing the chip area devoted to wires.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version
A survey of carbon nanotube interconnects for energy efficient integrated circuits
This article is a review of the state-of-art carbon nanotube interconnects for Silicon application with respect to the recent literature. Amongst all the research on carbon nanotube interconnects, those discussed here cover 1) challenges with current copper interconnects, 2) process & growth of carbon nanotube interconnects compatible with back-end-of-line integration, and 3) modeling and simulation for circuit-level benchmarking and performance prediction. The focus is on the evolution of carbon nanotube interconnects from the process, theoretical modeling, and experimental characterization to on-chip interconnect applications. We provide an overview of the current advancements on carbon nanotube interconnects and also regarding the prospects for designing energy efficient integrated circuits. Each selected category is presented in an accessible manner aiming to serve as a survey and informative cornerstone on carbon nanotube interconnects relevant to students and scientists belonging to a range of fields from physics, processing to circuit design
Analog layout design automation: ILP-based analog routers
The shrinking design window and high parasitic sensitivity in the advanced technology have imposed special challenges on the analog and radio frequency (RF) integrated circuit design. In this thesis, we propose a new methodology to address such a deficiency based on integer linear programming (ILP) but without compromising the capability of handling any special constraints for the analog routing problems. Distinct from the conventional methods, our algorithm utilizes adaptive resolutions for various routing regions. For a more congested region, a routing grid with higher resolution is employed, whereas a lower-resolution grid is adopted to a less crowded routing region. Moreover, we strengthen its speciality in handling interconnect width control so as to route the electrical nets based on analog constraints while considering proper interconnect width to address the acute interconnect parasitics, mismatch minimization, and electromigration effects simultaneously. In addition, to tackle the performance degradation due to layout dependent effects (LDEs) and take advantage of optical proximity correction (OPC) for resolution enhancement of subwavelength lithography, in this thesis we have also proposed an innovative LDE-aware analog layout migration scheme, which is equipped with our special routing methodology. The LDE constraints are first identified with aid of a special sensitivity analysis and then satisfied during the layout migration process. Afterwards the electrical nets are routed by an extended OPC-inclusive ILP-based analog router to improve the final layout image fidelity while the routability and analog constraints are respected in the meantime. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our proposed methods in terms of both circuit performance and image quality compared to the previous works
- …