GridNet: Fast Data-Driven EM-Induced IR Drop Prediction and Localized Fixing for On-Chip Power Grid Networks

Electromigration (EM) is a major failure effect for on-chip power grid networks of deep submicron VLSI circuits. EM degradation of metal grid lines can lead to excessive voltage drops (IR drops) before the target lifetime. In this paper, we propose a fast data-driven EM-induced IR drop analysis framework for power grid networks, named GridNet, based on the conditional generative adversarial networks (CGAN). It aims to accelerate the incremental full-chip EM-induced IR drop analysis, as well as IR drop violation fixing during the power grid design and optimization. More importantly, GridNet can naturally leverage the differentiable feature of deep neural networks (DNN) to obtain the sensitivity information of node voltage with respect to the wire resistance (or width) with marginal cost. Grid-Net treats continuous time and the given electrical features as input conditions, and the EM-induced time-varying voltage of power grid networks as the conditional outputs, which are represented as data series images. We show that GridNet is able to learn the temporal dynamics of the aging process in continuous time domain. Besides, we can take advantage of the sensitivity information provided by GridNet to perform efficient localized IR drop violation fixing in the late stage design and optimization. Numerical results on 36000 synthesized power grid network samples demonstrate that the new method can lead to 10
⁵
× speedup over the recently proposed full-chip coupled EM and IR drop analysis tool. We further show that localized IR drop violation fix for the same set of power grid networks can be performed remarkably efficiently using the cheap sensitivity computation from GridNet.