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arXiv · 2009.09009

Thermal and IR Drop Analysis Using Convolutional Encoder-Decoder Networks

Vidya A. Chhabria·Vipul Ahuja·Ashwath Prabhu·Nikhil Patil·Palkesh Jain·Sachin S. Sapatnekar
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Abstract

Computationally expensive temperature and power grid analyses are required during the design cycle to guide IC design. This paper employs encoder-decoder based generative (EDGe) networks to map these analyses to fast and accurate image-to-image and sequence-to-sequence translation tasks. The network takes a power map as input and outputs the corresponding temperature or IR drop map. We propose two networks: (i) ThermEDGe: a static and dynamic full-chip temperature estimator and (ii) IREDGe: a full-chip static IR drop predictor based on input power, power grid distribution, and power pad distribution patterns. The models are design-independent and must be trained just once for a particular technology and packaging solution. ThermEDGe and IREDGe are demonstrated to rapidly predict the on-chip temperature and IR drop contours in milliseconds (in contrast with commercial tools that require several hours or more) and provide an average error of 0.6% and 0.008% respectively.

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Vidya A. Chhabria, Vipul Ahuja, Ashwath Prabhu, Nikhil Patil, Palkesh Jain, Sachin S. Sapatnekar. 2020-09-18. Thermal and IR Drop Analysis Using Convolutional Encoder-Decoder Networks. https://arxiv.org/abs/2009.09009

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