Walking pads: Fast power-supply pad-placement optimization

We propose a novel C4 pad placement optimization framework for 2D power delivery grids: Walking Pads (WP). WP optimizes pad locations by moving pads according to the “virtual forces” exerted on them by other pads and current sources in the system. WP algorithms achieve the same IR drop as state-of-the-art techniques, but are up to 634X faster. We further propose an analytical model relating pad count and IR drop for determining the optimal pad count for a given IR drop budget.