Decoupling capacitor allocation for power delivery network noise reduction based on standard cell layouts

Reliable power delivery is regarded as one of primary challenging problems in nano-meter VLSI design diagram. For dynamic voltage fluctuations on a power/ground(P/G) network, adding on-chip decoupling capacitors(decaps) is regarded as the most efficient way to reduce such noises. In this paper, we present an efficient heuristic method to allocate decaps based on transient analysis of p/g network. Our algorithm utilizes adjoint network method to efficiently calculate the sensitivity of objective function with respect to each decap value. Experimental results demonstrate that the algorithm is capable of optimizing p/g networks with hundreds of thousand nodes in 3.30 hours.