Inductance extraction for general interconnect structures

As the operation frequency reaches gigahertz in very deep-submicron designs, the effect of on-chip inductance on circuit performance can no longer be neglected. Therefore, it is desired to extract interconnect impedance and inductance accurately. Most previous works on impedance and inductance extraction are based on rectangular discretization which has been shown effective for the classical Manhattan based IC interconnect structures. As technology advances, however, more general IC interconnect structures, such as the X-based interconnect structure, have been in production. Those general interconnect structures allow wires to be routed with non-Manhattan shapes. For the non-Manhattan interconnect structures, rectangular discretization is obviously not sufficient. In this paper, we propose to use the surface integral formulation with triangular discretization to extract impedance and inductance for the general IC interconnect structures. Comparative studies with the well-known FastImp and IE3D show that our approach is flexible and effective