Abstract—Closed-form solutions for the 50 % delay, rise time, overshoots, and settling time of signals in an tree are presented. These solutions have the same accuracy characteristics of the Elmore delay for trees and preserves the simplicity and recursive characteristics of the Elmore delay. Specifically, the complexity of calculating the time domain responses at all the nodes of an tree is linearly proportional to the number of branches in the tree and the solutions are always stable. The closed-form expressions introduced here consider all damping conditions of an circuit including the underdamped response, which is not considered by the Elmore delay due to the nonmonotone nature of the response. The continuous analytical nature of the solutions makes these expressions suitable for design methodologies and optimization techniques. Also, the solutions have significantly improved accuracy as compared to the Elmore delay for an overdamped response. The solutions introduced here for trees can be practically used for the same purposes that the Elmore delay is used for trees.

Abstract – The effects of inductance on repeater insertion in RLC trees is the focus of this paper. An algorithm is introduced to insert and size repeaters within an RLC tree to optimize a variety of possible cost functions such as minimizing the maximum path delay, the skew between branches, or a combination of area, power, and delay. The algorithm has a complexity proportional to the square of the number of possible repeater positions and determines a repeater solution that is close to the global minimum. The repeater insertion algorithm is used to insert repeaters within several copper-based interconnect trees to minimize the maximum path delay based on both an RC model and an RLC model. The two buffering solutions are compared using the AS/X dynamic circuit simulator. It is shown that as inductance effects increase, the area and power consumed by the inserted repeaters to minimize the path delays of an RLC tree decreases. By including inductance in the repeater insertion methodology, the interconnect is modeled more accurately as compared to an RC model, permitting average savings in area, power, and delay of 40.8%, 15.6%, and 6.7%, respectively, for a variety of copper-based interconnect trees from a 0.25 μm CMOS technology. The average savings in area, power, and delay increases to 62.2%, 57.2%, and 9.4%, respectively, when using five times faster devices with the same interconnect trees. I.