Floorplanning Considering IR Drop in Multiple Supply Voltages Island Designs

Abstract

Voltage island has become a very effective design style for power saving in low-power design. However, the new design style also brings forward new challenges, especially to the designers of power/ground (P/G) networks. In this paper, we study the power delivery problem in voltage island designs, and propose to consider voltage drop during the floorplanning process to reduce design iterations. Our analysis shows that it is unnecessary to consider the pitch of the P/G network in the floorplan stage. By using the simplified searching strategy in floorplanning, we can obtain more robust low power design within reasonable runtime. Experimental results have demonstrated the effectiveness of our approach.