SI and PI Analyses of Complex IC Packagings

Using Non-conformal Domain Decomposition

Methods
Yang Shao
1
, Zhen Peng
2
, Jin-Fa Lee
3
ElectroScience Lab, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, The Ohio State University
1330 Kinnear Road, Columbus OH 43212 USA
1
shao.52@osu.edu
2
peng.98@osu.edu
3
lee.1863@osu.edu
AbstractIn this paper, we present non-conformal, non-
overlapping domain decomposition methods (DDMs) for DC
IR drop and AC signal integrity (SI) analyses of high-power
chip-package-PCBs. The proposed non-conformal DDMs start by
partitioning the composite device into inhomogeneous sub-regions
with temperature-dependent material properties. Subsequently,
each sub-domain is meshed independently according to its
own characteristic features. As a consequence, the troublesome
mesh-generation task for complex ICs can be greatly relaxed.
Numerical example of SI/PI analyses of a complex IC package
demonstrates the exibility and potentials of the proposed non-
conformal DDMs.
I. INTRODUCTION
Advances in interconnect technologies, such as the increase
of the number of metal layers and 3-D stacking technique,
have paved the way for higher functionality and superior
performance while reducing size, power, and cost in todays
integrated circuit and package products.
With the increase of clock frequency and edge rates as well
as the continuously downscaling of feature size and 3-D in-
terconnect technologies in high-speed systems, SI effects such
as signal delay, reection, attenuation, dispersion and crosstalk
have become one of the dominant factors in current deep sub-
micrometer CMOS technologies limiting overall performance
of high-speed systems.
Another major difculty is the power integrity (PI) issue.
For example, IR drop [1] is caused by the nite resistivity ()
of metals and current (I) drawn off from the power/ground
planes. Chip designs are susceptible to IR drop, especially
when the integrated circuit (IC) supply voltage V
dd
decreases
with the scaling of silicon processes. Note that the DC-IR drop
is proportional to the resistance of the power/ground plane.
In this paper, we present non-conformal, non-overlapping
domain decomposition methods (DDMs) for DC IR drop and
SI analyses of high-power chip-package-PCBs. The proposed
non-conformal DDMs are well-suited for analyzing SI/PI of
3-D product-level IC packages in three aspects. Firstly, the
methods derive their efciency by decomposing the original
large problem into several smaller, more manageable sub-
domains and solving each local sub-problem independently.
Secondly, the non-conformal DDMs described herein differ
(a) Top view
(b) side view 1
(c) side view 2
Fig. 1. Views of the complex IC package model and the simulated geometry.
from previous approaches since they not only allow for non-
matching meshes across the domain interfaces, but also they
allow the adjacent sub-domains to be geometrically non-
conformal. Lastly, for the AC SI analysis, the proposed non-
conformal DDM provides an efcient and effective precondi-
tioner for solving the indenite matrix equations resulting from
the discretization of the time harmonic Maxwell equations.
978-1-4673-2060-3/12/$31.00 2012 IEEE 179
II. PRODUCT-LEVEL PACKAGE MODEL
Fig. 1 (a) is a complex IC package benchmark set by IBM at
the 15th Conference on Electrical Performance of Electronic
Package (EPEP) during a special session Parallelization of
EM Full-Wave Solvers for Product-Level Problems [2]. This
package includes an 8-layer structure: Ground/Mounting Pads
(SURFACE), Signal (FC3), Ground (FC2), Signal (FC1), Sig-
nal (BC1), Power (BC2), Signal (BC3) and Ground/Mounting
pads (BASE). With this kind of stackup technique, routing
layers are buried between metallic planes and are therefore
shielded. Our objective is to study the SI of the highlighted
20 signal traces with all geometrical details and PI of the
power/ground layers. Subsequently, we cut the interested
portion as in Fig. 1 and analyze the reduced model with
dimensions of 10.5 mm by 16.5 mm.
III. DC IR DROP DDM FORMULATIONS
In this section, we introduce a non-conformal and non-
overlapping DDM for the solution of DC IR drop analysis. For
simplicity, we only decompose the original problem into two
sub-domains. The boundary value problem of electric potential
on the power delivery network (PDN) for the decomposed
problem of Fig. 3 may then be written as
Fig. 2. Notations for decomposing the original problem domain into two
sub-domains.

i

i
= 0 in
i
(1)

i
=
(i)
d
on
(i)
d
(2)

i
n
(i)
l
=

i
R
(i)
l
S
(i)
l
on
(i)
l
(3)

i
n
(i)
n
= 0 on
(i)
n
(4)

1
=
2
on
12
(5)

1
n
(1)

=
2

2
n
(2)

on
12
(6)
Here, i = 1, 2, is the temperature-dependent electrical con-
ductivity of the conductor.
d
is the Dirichlet boundary surface
where voltage on it is given,
l
represents the impedance
boundary surfaces to account for external loads such as chips
and memories. Moreover, R
l
and S
l
are the load resistance
and cross-sectional area of
l
, respectively. Finally,
n
denotes
the Neumann boundary surface through which no current is
allowed to ow.
Equations (5) and (6) are interface boundary conditions
(transmission conditions), which impose the continuities of
voltage and current

n
at the interface of adjacent sub-
domains.
The boundary conditions, the continuities of both voltage
and current across interfaces, will be imposed through the
interior penalty (IP) [5] method. The detailed derivations can
be found in [4] and are omitted here due to the limited space
of the paper.
The corresponding discrete Galerkin weak statement for
(3.33) can be written as the following,
Find
_
H
1
0
(
1
) H
1
0
(
2
) H
1
0
(
M
)
_
such that
a (v, ) +
0
v, +
1
v, +
2
v, +v,

R
l
S
l

l
= 0
(7)
v H
1
0
(
1
) H
1
0
(
2
) H
1
0
(
M
).
Here in Eq. 7, the rst two terms relate to the volume
penalty term as
a (v, ) :=
2

i=1
(v
i
,
i

i
)
i
(8)

0
v, :=
2

i=1
_
v
i
,
i

i
n
(i)

_
12
(9)
and the other terms in Eq. 7 are surface penalty terms as the
following,

1
v, :=
_

1
v
1
n
(1)

,
_

1
n
(1)

2
+

2

1
n
(2)

__
12
+
_

2
v
2
n
(2)

,
_

2
n
(2)

1
+

1

2
n
(1)

__
12
(10)

2
v, :=

_
v
1
,
_

1
n
(1)

2
+

2

1
n
(2)

__
12

_
v
2
,
_

2
n
(2)

1
+

1

2
n
(1)

__
12
(11)
and,
_
v,

R
l
S
l
_

l
=
2

i=1
_
v
i
,

i
R
(i)
l
S
(i)
l
_

(i)
l
(12)
Finally, the Galerkin weak formulation for the general partition
of the domain to M sub-domains is straightforward.
IV. DDM FORMULATION FOR SI ANALYSIS
In this section, we again use a non-conformal and non-
overlapping DDM for solving the time-harmonic vector wave
equation.
Fig. 3. Notations for decomposition of the domain.
For simplicity and without loss of generality, we consider a
domain and only partition it into N
s
= 2 sub-domains, as in
180
Fig. 3, similar to section II. We will use the following twisted
tangential trace and tangential component trace operators

(u
i
) := n
i
u
i
|
i

(u
i
) := n
i
(u
i
n
i
)|
i
For convenience, we dene e
i
=

(E
i
), where E
i

H
0
(curl,
i
) represents the electric eld in the sub-domain

i
. The time harmonic Maxwell system for the decomposed
problem of Fig. 3 may then be written as

1
r1
E
1
k
2
0

r1
E
1
= jk
0

0
J
imp
1
in
1
(13)

1
r2
E
2
k
2
0

r2
E
2
= jk
0

0
J
imp
2
in
2
(14)

(E
1
) + e
1
+

e
1
on
+

1
r1
E
1
_
=

(E
2
)
+ e
2
+

e
2

1
r2
E
2
_
(15)

(E
2
) + e
2
+

e
2
on
+

1
r2
E
2
_
=

(E
1
)
+ e
1
+

e
1

1
r1
E
1
_
(16)
where k
0
=

0
is the wave number in free space,
and = 2f gives the radial frequency of operation with
frequency f in Hz.
0
and
0
are the permittivity and per-
meability in free space, respectively. In a material region, the
wave number is given by k =

where and are the

permittivity and permeability of the material. We also dene

r
= /
0
and
r
= /
0
as the relative permittivity and
permeability of the material. The intrinsic impedance in free
space is given by =
_

0
/
0
and
0
denotes the wavelength
in free space.
Equations (15) and (16) form the second order transmission
condition (SOTC). It is recognized that there are two types
of eigenmodes of the domain decomposition system matrix,
which are propagating and evanescent modes. The commonly
used rst order Robin-type transmission condition (FOTC) is
effective only for propagating modes, not evanescent ones,
while the SOTC provides convergence for both propagating
and evanescent modes, to improve the convergence of the
domain decomposition method. As clearly demonstrated in
Ref. [3], it enforces the necessary continuities of the tangential
electric and magnetic elds on the interface between sub-
domains with accelerated convergence of the algorithm,
because it shifts eigenvalues that correspond to both transverse
electric (TE) and transverse magnetic (TM) evanescent modes
away from zero [6].
V. NUMERICAL RESULTS
First, an automatic domain partitioning strategy is uti-
lized to divide the entire model into 149 sub-domains. Each
sub-domain is then discretized independently into a tetrahe-
dral mesh and an h-version of adaptive mesh renement is
employed. Next, the non-overlapping domain decomposition
methods are adopted to efciently solve the nite element ma-
trix equation. A Krylov subspace iterative method, Generalized
Conjugate Residual (GCR) [8], is adopted. In the following
numerical studies, we use a relative residue = 10
6
. PI effect
of DC IR drop and SI effects such as signal delay, coupling
and reection are simulated on the product-level IC package
benchmark.
A. DC IR Drop Analysis
The proposed non-overlapping, non-conformal DDM ad-
dresses the complex IC packaging problem effectively. DDM
exhibits fast convergence (75 Krylov iterations are required to
converge to 10
6
).
(a)
(b)
Fig. 4. IBM package PDN with boundary conditions and voltage distribution
on the top plane (unit: V), (a) boundary conditions and ports; and, (b) voltage
distribution at room temperature.
Figure 4 shows the boundary conditions and the voltage
distribution on the top layer, respectively. The results indicate
that the left bottom corner of layer 1 will see 28 mV of voltage
drop. If the nominal voltage of this rail is 1.0 V, the IR drop
is 2.8% of nominal. Moreover, the simulated IR drop result
on the power grids and on the ground grids of the example
are shown in gures 5 and 6, respectively.
181
(a)
(b)
Fig. 5. Voltage distribution on the power planes of layer1 and layer7 (unit:
V), (a) sideview; and, (b) detailed view.
Fig. 6. Voltage distribution on the ground planes of layer3, layer4, layer5,
layer6 and layer8 (unit: V).
B. Signal Integrity Analysis
In Fig. 7, we compare the computed S parameters by the
proposed approach with the measurement from DC to 10 GHz.
A fairly reasonable agreement between the two is established.
More result about the S parameters from DC to 30 GHz can be
nd in Ref. [7]. Furthermore, the signal integrity of the IBM
package benchmark is investigated in the time domain through
the delay time and the eye diagram. The computed time do-
main results (via IFFT of the frequency domain S parameters)
are plotted and compared against the measurements in Fig.
8. The overall good agreements between the computed and
measured results clearly demonstrate the high accuracy of the
proposed method. Particularly, the computed transient output
gives a delay time of 120.2 ps showing excellent agreement
with 118.6 ps of the measurement value.
VI. CONCLUSION
3-D product-level package SI/PI is analyzed by a systematic
non-conformal domain decomposition method in this paper.
Fig. 7. S
21
parameter magnitude comparasion between measurement
(dashed) and the proposed approach (continuous).
Fig. 8. Comparasion of measured (dashed) and computed (continuous)
transient waveform, V
computedout
compared with V
measuredout
.
Numerical results verify the analysis and demonstrate that the
proposed method is stable, accurate and efcient on extremely
complicated system.
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