Package routability- and IR-drop-aware finger/pad planning for single chip and stacking IC designs

Due to the increasing complexity of the design interactions between the chip and package, it is necessary to consider them at the same time. In order to simultaneously handle chip and package performances, co-design of chip and package is a widely adopted solution, particularly because the finger/pad locations significantly affect IR-drop of the core and the package routing. In this paper, we develop chip-package co-design techniques to determine the locations of the fingers/pads for package routability and signal integrity concerns in IC designs, this method can be used in the 2-D and stacking IC design. Our finger/pad assignment is a two-step method: we first solve the wire congestion problem in package routing, and then try to minimize the IR-drop violation and the length of the bonding wires under a compact IR-drop model. The experimental results are encouraging. Compared with the randomly optimized method, on average, our approaches reduce the maximum package density by 42% and 68% for both technologies, IR-drop by 10.61% and 4.58%; and the bonding wires is reduced by 15.66% if we use stacking chips. & 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.