Dynamic IR drop estimation at gate level with standard library information

In the nanometer era, IR-drop has become one of the critical issues in current VLSI designs. Although checking this problem earlier can speed up the analysis, not many tools are available now due to the limited design information. Most existing approaches at gate level require additional characterization to consider the effects of different resistances on supply lines. Therefore, an analytical method is proposed to estimate the IR-drop values without extra information. After modifying the data stored in standard libraries (.lib) and the events stored in activity files (.vcd), using the previous method can also obtain accurate supply current waveforms and IR-drop values for any given supply resistance, as demonstrated by the experiments on several benchmark circuits.