Abstract: A gate level maximum power supply noise (PSN) model is defined that captures both IR drop and di/dt noise effects.Experimental results show that this model improves PSN estimation by 5.3% on average and reduces computation time by 10.7% compared with previous methods.Furthermore,a primary input critical factor model that captures the extent of primary inputs’ PSN contribution is formulated.Based on these models,a novel niche genetic algorithm is proposed to estimate PSN more effectively.Compared with general genetic algorithms,this novel method can achieve up to 19.0% improvement on PSN estimation with a much higher convergence speed.

Key words: power supply noise, gate level model, niche genetic algorithm