Analysis of IR-drop scaling with implications for deep submicron P/G network designs

This paper presents a detailed analysis of the power-supply voltage (IR) drop scaling in DSM technologies. For the first time, the effects of temperature, electromigration and interconnect technology scaling (including resistivity increase of Cu interconnects due to electron surface scattering and finite barrier thickness) are taken into consideration during this analysis. It is shown that the IR-drop effect in the power/ground (P/G) network increases rapidly with technology scaling, and using well-known counter measures such as wire-sizing and decoupling capacitor insertion with resource allocation schemes that are typically used in the present designs may not be sufficient to limit the voltage fluctuations over the power grid for future technologies. It is also shown that such voltage drops on power lines of switching devices in a clock network can introduce significant amount of skew which in turn degrades the signal integrity.

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