Design migration from peripheral ASIC design to area-I/O flip-chip design by chip I/O planning and legalization

Abstract

Due to higher input/output (I/O) count and power delivery problem in deep submicrometer (DSM) regime, flip-chip technology, especially for area-array architecture, has provided more opportunities for adoption than traditional peripheral bonding design style in high-performance application-specific integrated circuit and microprocessor designs. However, it is hard to tell which technique can provide better design cost edge in usually concerned perspectives. In this paper, we present a methodology to convert a previous peripheral bonding design to an area-I/O flip-chip design. It is based on an I/O buffer modeling and an I/O planning algorithm to legalize I/O buffer blocks with core placement without sacrificing much of the previous optimization in the original core placement. The experimental results have shown that we have achieved better area and I/O wirelength in area-IO flip-chip configuration (especially for pad-limit designs), compared with peripheral bonding configuration in packaging consideration.