Interconnect Scaling Implications for CAD

Interconnect scaling to deep submicron processes pre-sents many challenges to today’s CAD flows. A recent analy-sis by Sylvester and Keutzer examined the behavior of average length wires under scaling, and controversially con-cluded that current CAD tools are adequate for future mod-ule-level designs. In our work, we show that average length wire scaling is sensitive to the technology assumptions, although the change in their behavior is small under all rea-sonable scaling assumptions. However, examining only aver-age length wires is optimistic, since long wires are the ones that primarily cause CAD tool exceptions. In a module of fixed complexity, under both optimistic and pessimistic scal-ing assumptions, the number of long wires will increase slowly with scaling. More importantly, as the overall di