A decap placement methodology for reducing joule heating and temperature in PSN interconnect

Power Supply Networks (PSN) are susceptible to electromigration failure and increased resistance due to high on-chip temperatures and large power supply currents. Joule heating, which leads to increased localized interconnect temperatures and higher resistivity in the PSN interconnect, exacerbates this reliability problem and is only expected to worsen in future technologies. The best method of reducing interconnect Joule heating is by reducing the RMS current within the interconnect. Consequently, we propose the first gradient-based decoupling capacitance placement method to reduce the magnitude of the current spikes in the interconnect. Our experiments show that our propose approach can reduce interconnect temperatures by 12.5 K which results in a 4.7% decrease in resistivity and an increase of 66.3% in electromigration lifetime.