Numerical Modeling of High-speed Microelectronic Interconnects for the Signal Integrity Analysis

Facing to the incessant increase of data processing speed, the microelectronic interconnections play an important role during the design of the integrated system. As the interconnection signal delays dominate widely gate delays, accurate interconnection model is needed. Indeed, direct mathematical calculation of distributed interconnection transient responses is generally very complicated. For this reason, one proposes to develop a numerical modeling method of prediction of the signal integrity (SI) propagating though the distributed interconnection lines. For that, the microelectronic interconnect lines are assumed as comprised of periodical lumped L-cells cascaded. Via L-cell transfer matrix analysis, it is established how to determine the equivalent global transfer function versus the lumped cell element number n. To verify the relevance of developed model, RC-line with mm-length excited by square-wave-pulse with 10 Gbits/s rate was investigated in function of n and the interconnect line per unit length parameters. As results, transient responses perfectly well-correlated to the SPICE-computations were found with relative errors lower than 5% for n higher than 20. In addition, values of propagation delays and signal attenuations closed to SPICE-models were evidenced for various interconnection network parameters. The computation-time for the execution of the proposed method algorithm was only of tens μs.