A new and efficient approach for estimating the accurate time-domain response of single and capacitive coupled distributed RC interconnects

This paper describes a novel yet highly efficient approach for estimating the time-domain response of capacitive coupled distributed RC interconnects. By using this method, the voltage signal at any particular point in such wires can be accurately and quickly obtained with very low computational cost. The proposed model exhibits a very good agreement with HSPICE simulations with worst-case error less than 3% and can be readily implemented in CAD analysis tools. This paper also presents an efficient model to estimate the capacitive crosstalk in high-speed very large scale integration (VLSI) circuits. Experimental results show that the maximum error of our peak noise predictions is less than 2.5%. In addition, this work presents an efficient artificial neural network (ANN)-based technique for modeling the time-domain response of interconnects and crosstalk noise. While existing fast noise estimation metrics may overestimate or underestimate the coupling noise, the simulation results demonstrate the ability of this approach to successfully predict coupling noise with a very good accuracy as compared to HSPICE in modest CPU times. Thereby, the proposed models and techniques can be used to predict the signal integrity for designing high-speed and high-density VLSI circuits. (C) 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.