Noninvasive leakage power tomography of integrated circuits by compressive sensing

Abstract

We introduce a new methodology for noninvasive post-silicon characterization of the unique static power profile (tomogram) of each manufactured chip. The total chip leakage is measured for multiple input vectors in a linear optimization framework where the unknowns are the gate leakage variations. We propose compressive sensing for fast extraction of the unknowns since the leakage tomogram contains correlations and can be sparsely represented. A key advantage of our approach is that it provides leakage variation estimates even for inaccessible gates. Experiments show that the methodology enables fast and accurate noninvasive extraction of leakage power characteristics.