International Business Machines Corporation

Richard A Wachnick

James Douglas Warnock

Arun Joseph

Leon Jacob Sigal

Sungjae Lee

Nagashyamala R Dhanwada

Michael R Scheuermann

Arjen Alexander Mets

William W Dungan

A system and method for enabling the estimation and mitigation of self-heating in chip designs at a much earlier stage in a design flow. The system and method provides unique characterization of each standard cell in a library for its effective thermal resistance based on the topology and layout of the cell, and brings this per standard cell instance based delta-T to be available for the timing closure tools when completing a synthesized design. Thus, at the timing closure process, the generated design is free of self heating violations. The method computes a unique thermal resistance characterization on per standard cell manner&#x2014;based on the topology, function and layout of the standard cell, and uses that to compute the deltaT per instance of the design. This information is presented to a violation mitigation tool which changes the power levels of the cells, logic function to mitigate the self heating violations.

Early analysis and mitigation of self-heating in design flows

Growing community of inventors

Mount Kisco, NY, United States of America

Richard A Wachnick