A Multilevel Spectral Framework for Scalable Vectorless Power/Thermal Integrity Verification

Zhiqiang Zhao, Zhuo Feng

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract

Vectorless integrity verification is becoming increasingly critical to the robust design of nanoscale integrated circuits. This article introduces a general vectorless integrity verification framework that allows computing the worst-case voltage drops or temperature (gradient) distributions across the entire chip under a set of local and global workload (power density) constraints. To address the computational challenges introduced by the large power grids and three-dimensional mesh-structured thermal grids, we propose a novel spectral approach for highly scalable vectorless verification of large chip designs by leveraging a hierarchy of almost linear-sized spectral sparsifiers of input grids that can well retain effective resistances between nodes. As a result, the vectorless integrity verification solution obtained on coarse-level problems can effectively help compute the solution of the original problem. Our approach is based on emerging spectral graph theory and graph signal processing techniques, which consists of a graph topology sparsification and graph coarsening phase, an edge weight scaling phase, as well as a solution refinement procedure. Extensive experimental results show that the proposed vectorless verification framework can efficiently and accurately obtain worst-case scenarios in even very large designs.

Original languageEnglish
Article number3529534
JournalACM Transactions on Design Automation of Electronic Systems
Volume28
Issue number1
DOIs
StatePublished - 10 Dec 2022

Keywords

  • Vectorless integrity verification
  • graph signal processing
  • spectral graph coarsening
  • spectral graph theory

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