Finding and fixing leakage between power domains

While there are many forms of current leakage in semiconductors, one especially nefarious type of leakage happens between power rails or power domains. Finding inter-domain leakage is vitally important for design reliability, especially in mixed power system design, but it is a known weakness of traditional electronic design automation (EDA) tools. Specialized EDA tools are needed to accurately identify and analyze the risk of leakage between power domains. The innovative Insight™ Analyzer tool from Siemens EDA can quickly and accurately identify the risk of leakage between power domains, as well as many other circuit reliability issues, using algorithms that provide superior results compared to both simulation and traditional electrical rule checking (ERC) tools.

The Insight Analyzer tool: Fast, accurate inter-domain leakage analysis for IC design

Solving the challenges of accurately identifying inter-domain leakages is a two-stage process: find all DC paths between power domains (based on parasitic diodes), then reduce the results to only the real problems, eliminating the "don’t-care" results. The goal is to reduce the number of results that must be debugged by circuit designers by presenting only valid inter-domain leakages. The Insight Analyzer tool contains a rich set of built-in checks for circuit reliability issues, including current leakage, floats, over-voltage, and many other circuit issues that can’t always be caught by simulation. The user-friendly Insight Analyzer GUI displays all violations in a table that designers can filter and sort. The Insight Analyzer tool also simplifies the debugging process by showing designers exactly what the issue is, where it is, and how it happens. Using Insight Analyzer checks, circuit designers can improve design reliability and quality with fast, accurate inter-domain leakage identification and correction.