Capturing the effect of crosstalk on delay

Crosstalk is generally recognized as a major problem in IC design. This paper presents a novel approach to the efficient measurement of the effect of crosstalk on the delay of a net using an algorithm whose worst-case complexity is polynomial-time in the number of nets. The cost of the algorithm is seen to be O(nlogn) in practice, where n is the number of nets, and it is amenable to being incorporated into the inner loop of a timing optimizer. To illustrate this, the method is applied to reduce the effects of crosstalk in channel routing, where it is seen to give an average improvement of 23% in the delay in a channel as compared to the worst case, as measured by SPICE