On the chicken-and-egg problem of determining the effect of crosstalk on delay in integrated circuits

Abstract

This paper presents an approach to measurement of the effect of crosstalk on the delay of a net using an algorithm whose worst-case complexity is quadratic to the number of nets. The algorithm is amenable to being incorporated into the inner loop of a timing optimizer and is illustrated on a channel router, where it is seen to give improvements of about 20-30% in the average delay in a channel as compared to the worst case.