Power-Delivery Networks Optimization with Thermal Reliability Integrity

With the growing power consumption in modern high performance VLSI designs, nonuniform temperature distribution and limited heat-conduction capability have caused thermal induced performance and reliability degradation. Electromigration is the main reliability concern and will become a more limiting factor of IC designs. It must be addressed together with a thermal reliability modeling. This issue also has been recognized in the International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors (ITRS) 2002 update as one of the difficult challenges [1]. Although the impacts of thermal effects on transistor and interconnect performance are wellstudied, but still how thermal effects affect the reliability of power delivery is not very clear. As a result, traditional power-delivery designs without thermal consideration may cause soft-error, reliability degradation, and even premature chip failures. In this paper, we propose an algorithm for power-delivery networks optimization with thermal reliability integrity. By considering thermal and power integrity, we are able to achieve high power supply quality and thermal reliability. For a 56×72 mesh, our design shows that the lifetime of the optimized ground network is 9.8 years. Whereas the lifetime of the ground network designed by a traditional method without thermal integrity is only 4.1 years.