With technology scaling into nanometer regime, rampant process variations impact visible influences on leakage power estimation of very large scale integrations (VLSIs). In order to deal with the case of large inter- and intra-die variations, we induce a novel theory prototype of the statistical leakage power analysis (SLPA) for function blocks. Because inter-die variations can be pinned down into a small range but the number of gates in function blocks is large(>1000), we continue to simplify the prototype. At last, we induce the efficient methodology of SLPA. The method can save much running time for SLPA in the low power design since it is of the local-updating advantage. A large number of experimental data show that the method only takes feasible running time (0.32 s) to obtain accurate results (3 σ-error <0.5% on maximum) as function block circuits simultaneous suffer from 7.5%(3 σ/mean) inter-die and 7.5% intra-die length variations, which demonstrates that our method is suitable for statistical leakage power analysis of VLSIs under rampant process variations.
With soaring work frequency and decreasing feature sizes, VLSI circuits with RLC parasitic components are more like analog circuits and should be carefully analyzed in physical design. However, the number of extracted RLC components is typically too large to be analyzed efficiently by using present analog circuit simulators like SPICE. In order to speedup the simulations without error penalty, this paper proposes a novel methodology to compress the time-descritized circuits resulted from numerical integration approximation at every time step. The main contribution of the methodology is the efficient structure-level compression of DC circuits containing many current sources, which is an important complement to present circuit analysis theory. The methodology consists of the following parts: 1) An approach is proposed to delete all intermediate nodes of RL branches. 2) An efficient approach is proposed to compress and back-solve parallel and serial branches so that it is error-free and of linear complexity to analyze circuits of tree topology. 3) The Y toπtransformation method is used to error-free reduce and back-solve the intermediate nodes of ladder circuits with the linear complexity. Thus, the whole simulation method is very accurate and of linear complexity to analyze circuits of chain topology. Based on the methodology, we propose several novel algorithms for efficiently solving RLC-model transient power/ground (P/G) networks. Among them, EQU-ADI algorithm of linear-complexity is proposed to solve RLC P/G networks with mesh-tree or mesh-chain topologies. Experimental results show that the proposed method is at least two orders of magnitude faster than SPICE while it can scale linearly in both time- and memory-complexity to solve very large P/G networks.
LUO ZuyingCAI YiciSheldon X.-D TanHONG XianlongWANG XiaoyiPAN ZhuFU Jingjing
