Energy modeling of coupled interconnects including intrinsic misalignment effects

In modern nanometric and deep sub-micron (DSM) technologies, the energy dissipation in the interconnect architecture is dominating the overall energy budget. This paper presents a precise mathematical model for the energy consumption of multi-segment interconnects, including misalignment effects. The difference in the propagation of the signals due to the unequal effective capacitance seen by each driver, produces an intrinsic misalignment that affects the power and worst-case delay in the interconnects. The notable accuracy improvement of our model leads to a better estimation of the energy consumption for each input transitions, provides a better efficiency characterization of low-power coding approaches, and can be used to study precisely stochastic approaches for interconnects. The proposed model has been experimentally validated using a commercial 65 nm technology.