Determination of Critical Parameters for Crosstalk Faults between On-chip Interconnects using Worst-Case Methods

Interconnects being the limiting factor for both performance and density in today's VLSI systems, interconnect parasitics are considered to be the prime sources of signal integrity problems. Line inductance and/or mutual inductance in certain interconnect lines usually give rise to overshoots and undershoots in voltage waveforms which may cause reliability concerns in circuits, cause glitches and may lead to false transitions at the gate output. Therefore, it is important to track down the limiting values or the critical parameters of influential parameters below which a fault tolerant behavior of the device can be guaranteed. Earlier, there have been some analytical approaches for calculating these critical values, which are always prone to the availability of direct analytical equations for each and every case. In this paper, we explored a numerical based technique called the advanced worst-case method to track down the critical parameter set. The worst-case method taken up in this work is capable of accurately and efficiently calculating the critical values in diverse scenarios. The concept has been validated on a comprehensive distributed crosstalk fault model that considers RLGC parameters, coupling parameters together with the strengths of the driver and the receiver.