VLSI on-chip power/ground network optimization considering decap leakage currents

In today's power/ground (P/G) network design, on-chip decoupling capacitors(decaps) are usually made of MOS transistors with source and drain connected together. The gate leakage current becomes worse as the gate oxide layer thickness continues to shrink below 20/spl Aring/. As a result, decaps become leaky due to the gate leakage from CMOS devices. In this paper, we take a first look at the leaky decaps in P/G network optimization. We propose a leakage current model for practical decaps and also present a new two-stage leakage-current-aware approach to efficiently optimize P/G networks in a more area efficient way.