Cross-Talk Noise Immune VLSI Design Using Regular Layout Fabrics (PDF)

This book was motivated by the problems being faced with shrinking IC process feature sizes. It is well known that as process feature sizes shrink, a host of electrical problems like cross-talk, electromigration, self-heat, etc. are becoming important. Cross-talk is one of the major problems since it results in unpredictable design behavior. In particular, it can result in significant delay variation or signal integrity problems in a wire, depending on the state of its neighboring wires. Typical approaches to tackle the cross-talk problem attempt to fix the problem once it is created. In our approach, we ensure that cross-talk is eliminated by design. The work described in this book attempts to take an "outside-the-box" view and propose a radically different design style. This design style first imposes a fixed layout pattern (or fabric) on the integrated circuit, and then embeds the circuit being implemented into this fabric. The fabric is chosen carefully in order to eliminate the cross-talk problem being faced in modem IC processes. With our choice of fabric, cross-talk between adjacent wires on an IC is reduced by between one and two orders of magnitude. In this way, the fabric concept eliminates cross-talk up-front, and by design. We propose two separate design flows, each of which uses the fabric concept to implement logic. The first flow uses fabric-compliant standard cells as an im­ plementation vehicle. We call these cells fabric cells, and they have the same logic functionality as existing standard cells with which they are compared.