Claudia Amina Padula
IR-Drop-Aware Timing Optimization in IC Digital Backend Design via Mitigation of Power-Integrity Aggressors.
Rel. Guido Masera. Politecnico di Torino, Corso di laurea magistrale in Ingegneria Elettronica (Electronic Engineering), 2026
Abstract
Modern System-on-Chip (SoC) designs manufactured in advanced technology nodes face increasingly critical interactions between power integrity and timing performance. As supply voltages scale down and current densities rise, localized IR-drop hotspots become more frequent and severe, reducing the effective VDD delivered to standard cells. This can cause disproportionate delay degradation in Vmin-sensitive cells, whose performance strongly depends on small voltage fluctuations. Consequently, timing failures that appear to stem from intrinsically weak logic paths are often driven instead by local power-delivery weaknesses: cells located in IR-drop hotspots operate at a reduced voltage, increasing their delay and ultimately inducing setup timing violations. This thesis addresses this coupled problem by proposing a methodology that mitigates IRdrop at its root cause, focusing on aggressor cells — cell instances whose switching activity, current profile, and physical placement contribute most to local supply-voltage collapse.
The key idea is to apply a targeted drive-strength downsizing strategy to these aggressors
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