An efficient algorithm for 3-D interconnect capacitance extraction considering the floating dummy-fills

The insertion of dummy metals is necessary to reduce the pattern-dependent variations of the dielectric thickness in the CMP process. This makes conventional tools of capacitance extraction exhibit prohibitive calculation time. This paper presents an efficient method for 3D capacitance extraction with taking the floating dummies into account. Based on the QMM-accelerated BEM, our method inherits high computational speed while considering the floating conditions and using a new preconditioner. For some typical structures including floating dummies, our method shows high accuracy and over 1000x speed-up over Raphael, about 10x speed-up over the method in the work of J.-K. Park et al. (2000).