Crosstalk-Aware Statistical Interconnect Delay Calculation

Abstract — As the device geometries are shrinking, the impact of crosstalk effects increases, which results in a stronger depen-dence of interconnect delay on the input arrival time difference between victim and aggressor inputs (input skew). The increasing process variations lead to statistical input skew which induces sig-nificant interconnect delay variations. Therefore, it is necessary to take input skew variation into account for interconnect delay calculation in the presence of process variations. Existing timing analysis tools evaluate gate and interconnect delays separately. In this paper, we focus on statistical interconnect delay calculation considering crosstalk effects. A piecewise linear delay-change-curve model enables closed-form analytical evaluation of the sta-tistical interconnect delay caused by input skew (SK) variations. This method can handle arbitrarily distributed SK variations. The process-variation (PV)-induced interconnect delay variation is handled in a quadratic delay model which considers coupling effects. The SK- and PV-induced interconnect delay variations are combined together for crosstalk-aware statistical interconnect delay calculation. The experimental results indicate that the pro-posed method can predict the interconnect delay impacted by both input skew variation and process variations with average (maxi-mum) absolute mean error 0.25 % (0.75%) and standard devia-tion error 1.31 % (3.53%) for different types of coupled wires in a 65nm technology. I