Vector-based Dynamic IR-drop Prediction Using Machine Learning

Vector-based dynamic IR-drop analysis of the entire vector set is infeasible due to long runtime. In this paper, we use machine learning to perform vector-based IR drop prediction for all logic cells in the circuit. We extract important features, such as toggle counts and arrival time, directly from the logic simulation waveform so that we can perform vector-based IR-drop prediction quickly. We also propose a feature engineering method, density map, to increase correlation by 0.1. Our method is scalable because the feature dimension is fixed (72), independent of design size and cell library. Our experiments show that the mean absolute error of the predictor is less than 3% of the nominal supply voltage. We achieve more than 495 speedups compared to a popular commercial tool. Our machine learning prediction can be used to identify IR-drop risky vectors from the entire test vector set, which is infeasible using traditional IR-drop analysis.