A Novel and Efficient Method for Power Pad Placement Optimization

Ting Yu and Martin. D. F. Wong
UIUC


Abstract

The distribution of power supply pads in power distribution network directly decides IR-drop distribution of the network. In this paper, we propose a novel and efficient iterative method to optimize the placement of C4 bump arrays, so that quality of IR-drop distribution of power grid can be improved. We develop a new method to calculate new locations for all the pads. Relocating pads to the new locations help reduce local IR-drop values. In order to reduce global IR-drop values, we develop a graph-based strategy to decide which pads are moved to the new locations. After each iteration, a static IR-drop analysis is performed to update the IR-drop distribution. Several other techniques are further proposed to help IR-drop reduction. To verify the proposed method, we develop multigrid accelerated modified Simulated Annealing method (MG_SA) and compare the two methods on a set of test cases. The proposed method outperforms MG_SA with better IR-drop quality and much less Runtime. With only several iterations, the proposed method generates an optimized placement of power pads, which leads to a much better IR-drop distribution of the grid.