Early Stage Power Supply Planning: A Heuristic Method for Codesign of Power/Ground Network and Floorplan

It's a trend to consider the power supply integrity at early stage to improve the design quality. Specifically, floorplanning process is modified to improve the power supply as well. In the modified floorplanning process, both the floorplan and power/ground (P/G) network are adjusted to search for optimal floorplan as well as the most robust power supply. In this paper, we propose a novel algorithm to carry out this modified floorplanning. A new analytical method is proposed to estimate the voltage drop while the floorplan is varying constantly. This fast analytical voltage drop estimating method is plugged into the modified floorplanner to speed up the whole floorplanning process. Compared with previous methods, our algorithm can search for the optimal floorplan with consideration of power supply integrity more efficiently and therefore leads to better results. Furthermore, this paper also proposes a novel heuristic method to optimize the topology of P/G network. This optimization algorithm could construct a more robust power supply system. Experimental results show the method can speedup the IR-drop aware floorplanning process by about 10 times and reduce the routing area of P/G network while maintaining the floorplan quality and power supply integrity.