Noise-aware driver modeling for nanometer technology

Abstract

With the semiconductor industry evolving into the deep sub-micron (DSM) era, crosstalk noise becomes a critical issue that needs to be handled efficiently and accurately. Modern designs like system-on-chips have millions of noise-prone wires that need to be analyzed. Analysis using circuit-level simulation is not feasible. Efficient static noise analysis, which statically estimate noise based on linear circuit model, is widely used. However, traditionally drivers' holding resistances are pre-characterized without considering the crosstalk noise. The driver's holding resistance changes dramatically with the crosstalk noise induced voltage changing on the victim wire. For accurate noise estimation, the driver's substantial nonlinear variation cannot be ignored. In this paper, we propose a novel method, which uses layout extracted parameters of coupling interconnect and pre-characterized parameters of driver to calculate an effective holding resistance. The noise-aware effective holding resistance dramatically improves the accuracy for noise magnitude and energy estimation. The proposed method is simple and efficient. It enables fast on-the-fly calculation of the effective holding resistance. Experiments show significant improvement in accuracy with almost negligible computation overhead.