Higher Routability and Reduced Crosstalk Noise by Asynchronous Multiplexing of On-Chip Interconnects

The signal integrity problem, especially crosstalk noise, is an important issue in physical design in the nanometer regime. Wire multiplexing is a recently proposed method to reduce these problems in current design methodologies. This technique is presented to increase the routability of the design and also reduce crosstalk noise by serializing parallel wires via delay insensitive asynchronous serial transceivers. In this paper, this technique is improved in terms of routability and computation time and, also, its impact on crosstalk is examined. Finally, it is evaluated with 180 mm and 130 nm technologies. Experimental results show that for the attempted benchmarks, congestion and routability are improved by 15.54% and 21.57% on average, respectively, and crosstalk noise is improved by 9.51% on average. These improvements are achieved at the cost of a slight increase in power consumption (0.12% on average) and runtime (less than 10.01% on average).