3-D Parasitic Modeling for Rotary Interconnects

Abstract

Resonant rotary clocking is a high-frequency, low-power technology for high performance integrated circuits (IC). The implementation of the rotary clocking technology requires long interconnects with varying geometric shape segments on the chip, which are modeled by transmission lines. The parasitics exhibited by the transmission line interconnects play a major role in characterizing the high frequency operation. To this end, the impact of parasitics on the operating characteristics of the rotary rings due to the different interconnect segments are identified. The interconnect parasitics are analyzed using a 3D finite element method based full wave electromagnetic analysis. Simulations performed for the rotary ring with 3D full wave based parasitic analysis results in 23.68% reduced clock frequency when compared with a conventional 2D based parasitic analysis. The power dissipated on the rotary ring simulated using the 3D full wave based parasitic analysis is around 84% less than the clock tree and is within 5% of the power dissipated on the ring simulated using the 2D based parasitic analysis.