Parallel software for inductance extraction

Abstract

The next generation VLSI circuits will be designed with millions of densely packed interconnect segments on a single chip. Inductive effects between these segments begin to dominate signal delay as the clock frequency is increased. Modern parasitic extraction tools to estimate the onchip inductive effects with high accuracy have had limited impact due to large computational and storage requirements. This work describes a parallel software package for inductance extraction called ParIS, which is capable of analyzing interconnect configurations involving several conductors within reasonable time. The main component of the software is a novel preconditioned iterative method that is used to solve a dense complex linear system of equations. The linear system represents the inductive coupling between filaments that are used to discretize the conductors. A variant of the fast multipole method is used to compute dense matrix-vector products with the coefficient matrix. ParIS uses a two-tier parallel formulation that allows mixed mode parallelization using both MPIand OpenMP. An MPI process is associated with each conductor. The computation within a conductor is parallelized using OpenMP. The parallel efficiency and scalability of the software is demonstrated through experiments on the IBM p690 and Intel and AMD Linux clusters. These experiments highlight the portability and efficiency of the software on multiprocessors with shared, distributed, and distributed-shared memory architectures.