Paper Info
Title
Verifying RLC Power Grids With Transient Current Constraints
Abstract
Vectorless power grid verification is a powerful method that evaluates worst-case voltage noises without detailed current waveforms using optimization techniques. It is extremely challenging when considering RLC power grids because inductors are difficult to tackle and multiple time steps should be evaluated after the discretization of the system equation. In this paper, we study integrated RLC power grids with both VDD and GND networks, and introduce transient constraints to restrict the waveform of each current source for sign-off verification. We rigorously prove that the vectorless verification can be decomposed into two subproblems—the well-studied power grid transient analysis problem and a linear programming (LP) problem that optimizes an affine function of currents under current constraints—and propose to verify the power grid by transient simulation and noise optimization. A variable reduction algorithm is further proposed to generate reduced-size LP problems with a user-specified error tolerance, so that the conservative bounds of voltage noises can be computed efficiently. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm achieves significant speedup (e.g., up to more than $100\times$ with 5 mV error) over the standard LP solver in solving the LP problems, and the proposed transient constraints make the noise estimations more realistic.
Year
DOI
Venue
2013
10.1109/TCAD.2013.2248032
IEEE Transactions on Computer-Aided Design of Integrated Circuits and Systems
Keywords
DocType
Volume
vdd networks,reduced-size lp problems,current constraints,voltage drop,rlc circuits,circuit noise,sign-off verification,transient current constraints,voltage noises,system equation discretization,circuit optimisation,linear programming,current constraint,noise optimization techniques,worst-case voltage noise evaluation,gnd networks,variable reduction algorithm,user-specified error tolerance,vectorless verification,power grids,noise estimations,power grid transient analysis problem,linear programming problem,inductors,transient analysis,vectorless power grid verification,power grid,integrated rlc power grids
Journal
32
Issue
ISSN
Citations 
7
0278-0070
5
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.44
26
2
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Xuanxing Xiong1845.90
Jia Wang23322301.29