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Meet ECE's 2017 Vanier Scholar

Published: 20 June 2017

Marco Kassis

Parallel Time-Domain Analysis of Reduced Order Power Delivery Networks

The modern microsystems industry faces key challenges including signal and power integrity, both from design and design automation perspectives. As other system elements have become increasingly optimized, delivering clean and stable power supply through power delivery networks (PDNs) has become a notable limiting factor in design. Given the global paradigm shift towards multicore computing rather than higher clock frequencies, we use that to offer a contemporary solution to the power delivery research question.

Simulation of the large and complex PDNs is very timely and computationally demanding. The methodology we propose for modelling PDNs starts with a segmentation process. This divides the system into many, independent, smaller-size models, enabling all subsequent steps to be done in parallel. We then use mathematical schemes of model order reduction (MOR) to reduce the size of each of the systems simultaneously. We hence perform the simulations swiftly at a much reduced computational cost. The research question lies in increasing the complexity of the PDN model, where segmentation and MOR become less straightforward.

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