Dynamic Supply Current Waveform Estimation with Standard Library Information

Mu-Shun Matt LEE  Chien-Nan Jimmy LIU  

Publication
IEICE TRANSACTIONS on Fundamentals of Electronics, Communications and Computer Sciences   Vol.E93-A   No.3   pp.595-606
Publication Date: 2010/03/01
Online ISSN: 1745-1337
DOI: 10.1587/transfun.E93.A.595
Print ISSN: 0916-8508
Type of Manuscript: PAPER
Category: VLSI Design Technology and CAD
Keyword: 
dynamic supply current,  gate-level,  standard library,  

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Summary: 
In the nanometer era, the power integrity problem has become one of the critical issues. Although checking this problem earlier can speed up the analysis, not so many tools are available now due to the limited design information at high levels. Most existing approaches at gate level require extra information of the cell library, which may require extra characterization efforts while migrating to new cell libraries. Therefore, an analytical approach is proposed in this paper to dynamically estimate the supply current waveforms at gate level using existing library information only, even for sequential circuits. The experimental results have shown that the estimation errors of such a quick approach are only 10% compared to HSPICE results.