Efficient coupled noise estimation for on-chip interconnects

Abstract

Noise analysis and avoidance is an increasingly critical step in deep submicron design. Ever increasing requirements on performance have led to widespread use of dynamic logic circuit families and its other derivatives. These aggressive circuit families trade off noise margin for timing performance making them more susceptible to noise failure and increasing the need for noise analysis. Currently, noise analysis is performed either through circuit or timing simulation or through model order reduction. These techniques in use are still inefficient for analyzing massive amount of interconnect data found in present day integrated circuits. This paper presents efficient techniques for estimation of coupled noise in on-chip interconnects. This noise estimation metric is an upper bound for RC circuits, being similar in spirit to Elmore delay in timing analysis. Such an efficient noise metric is especially useful for noise criticality pruning and physical design based noise avoidance techniques.