IR-Drop Management CAD Techniques in FPGAs for Power Grid Reliability

Akhilesh Kumar and Mohab Anis
University of Waterloo


Abstract

The design of power grid network is critical in scaled technologies for reliable operation of the design. This paper presents novel CAD techniques for mitigating IR-drops in FPGAs. Placement and routing techniques are developed in the paper for improving the voltage profile of the power grid network. The proposed techniques not only improve the minimum voltage at any node in the FPGA power grid, but also reduces the variance of the supply voltage distribution across all the nodes in the power grid. An improvement of up to 7% in the minimum Vdd and up to 66% reduction in standard deviation of Vdd is obtained from the design technique proposed in this paper.