Stop Guessing on Multi-Die PG Planning: Let AI Find the IR-Drop Sweet Spot

Power and ground (PG) bump planning forces a hard trade-off. Too few PG bumps and IR-drop violations put the design at risk. Too many, and engineering teams compensate in routing congestion, die area, and downstream QoR. Engineers have historically closed that gap through manual iteration—place, analyze, adjust, repeat—a loop that breaks down when a single die carries hundreds of thousands to millions of interconnects.

The demo, Multi-Die PG Bump Optimization with Synopsys 3DIC Compiler, shows how the platform collapses that loop with AI, running the full path from prototype PG structures through EMIR analysis to an AI-driven optimized bump configuration.

DRC surfaces a cut-to-cut enclosure violation on the via layer beneath two bumps, and fixes it before the design is implemented. Catching bump errors during prototyping avoids costlier corrections at signoff. 3DIC Compiler platform’s enclosed multi-die checker flags over 60 violation types.

A scatter plot confirms the expected trend, as PG bump count rises, maximum voltage drop falls. But a second correlation against the Aggregate Design Score (ADS), which combines all selected metrics where lower is better, tells the complete story. Simply maximizing bumps drives congestion and other penalties, so the optimum is a trade-off point, not an extreme. The AI engine sweeps the parameter space, marks better results and worst cases, and identifies the best implementation automatically.

Manual PG bump planning has always been tedious, iterative, and error-prone, and it does not scale to million-bump multi-die designs. This demo shows the alternative where engineering teams define the problem once, let the tool explore, and let aggregate scoring surface the optimal trade-off point between IR-drop margin and physical cost.