Layout techniques for on-chip interconnect inductance reduction

Abstract

As the operation frequency reaches gigahertz in deep-submicron designs, the effects of inductance on noise and delay can no longer be neglected. Some of the previous techniques such as net ordering, shield insertion, twisted-bundle layout structure, and interdigitated techniques are either inefficient or incur too much area penalty. In this paper, we present two techniques ground-aware net routing and source pin positioning that can reduce inductance effectively without incurring area penalty. In order to prove the effectiveness of our techniques, we use the famous 3D field-solver FastHenry [7] to extract inductances and verify our results. All simulation results show that our proposed techniques can significantly reduce inductances without incurring area penalty.