Partitioning-based decoupling capacitor budgeting via sequence of linear programming

Abstract

In this paper, we propose an efficient algorithm to reduce the voltage noises for on-chip power/ground (P/G) networks of VLSI. The new method is based on the sequence of linear programming (SLP) as the optimization engine, and partitioning scheme for dealing with large-sized circuits. We show that by directly optimizing the decoupling capacitor (decap) areas as the objective function and using the time-domain adjoint method, SLP can deliver much better quality in terms of decap budget than existing methods based on the merged time-domain adjoint method. The partitioning strategy further improves the scalability of the proposed algorithm and makes it efficient for larger circuits. The resulting algorithm is general enough for any P/G network. Experimental results demonstrate the advantage of the proposed method over existing state-of-the-art methods in terms of solution quality at a mild computation cost increase.