Gasping the impact of on-chip inductance

The rapid advancements in process technology and heightening market pressures for functional integration are resulting in large VLSI chips operating at steadily increasing frequencies. The number of long global wires per chip has been continuously increasing with time. These wires carry high-frequency currents and have low resistance. This low resistance is due to the use of thick and wide interconnects at higher metal layers. Additionally, superior conducting materials such as copper have been introduced in order to keep the resistance and the RC delay of global lines small. These factors have led to a continuous increase in the importance of inductance, which has emerged as a standard factor that designers must take into consideration when designing high-performance chips in deep-submicron technologies. In this paper, the authors briefly discuss the importance, physical nature, effects, and extraction issues of on-chip inductance. Understanding the effects of on-chip inductance in high-speed integrated circuits is crucial to high-performance design