I/O clustering in design cost and performance optimization for flip-chip design

Abstract

I/O placement has always been a concern in modern IC design. Due to flip-chip technology, I/O can be placed throughout the whole chip without long wires from the periphery of the chip. However, because of I/O placement constraints in design cost and performance, I/O buffer planning becomes a pressing problem. During the early stages of circuits and packaging co-design, I/O layout should be evaluated to optimize design cost and to avoid product failures. In this paper, our objective is to better an existing/initial standard cell placement by I/O clustering, considering design cost reduction and signal integrity preservation. We formulate it as a minimum cost flow problem minimizing alphaW + betaD, where W is the I/O wirelength of the placement and D is the total voltage drop in the power network. The experimental results on some MCNC benchmarks show that our method achieves better timing performance and averagely over 30% design cost reduction when compared with the conventional design rule of thumb popularly used by circuit designers.