Layout techniques for on-chip interconnect inductance reduction

As the operation frequency reaches gigahertz in deep-submicron designs, the effects of inductance on noise and delay can no longer be neglected. Some of the previous techniques such as net ordering, shield insertion, twisted-bundle layout structure, and interdigitated techniques are either inefficient or incur too much area penalty. We present two techniques - ground-aware net routing and source pin positioning - that can reduce inductance effectively without incurring area penalty. In order to prove the effectiveness of our techniques, we use the famous 3D field-solver FastHenry [M. Kamon et al., (1994)] to extract inductances and verify our results. All simulation results show that our proposed techniques can significantly reduce inductances without incurring area penalty.