Studies of Interconnect Tuning for High-Performance Designs

Interconnect tuning is an increasingly critical degree of freedom in the design of high-performance VLSI systems. By interconnect tuning, we refer to the selection by a design team of line thicknesses, widths and spacings in multi-layer interconnect to simultaneously achieve: (i) distribution (available wiring density) for local signals, global signals, clock, power and ground; (ii) performance (signal propagation delay), particularly on global interconnects; (iii) noise immunity (signal integrity), again particularly on global interconnects; and (iv) manufacturability and reliability (e.g., required margins for AC self-heat or DC electromigration on interconnects, short-circuit power in attached devices, etc.). While interconnect tuning is a key activity in most leading-edge microprocessor projects, it has received very little attention in the literature. This work provides, to our knowledge, the first technology-specific studies of interconnect tuning in the literature. We center on ..