This paper presents a comprehensive survey of existing techniques for interconnect optimization during the VLSI physical design process, with emphasis on recent studies on interconnect design and optimization for high-performance VLSI circuit design under the deep submicron fabrication technologies. First, we present a number of interconnect delay models and driver/gate delay models of various degrees of accuracy and efficiency which are most useful to guide the circuit design and interconnect optimization process. Then, we classify the existing work on optimization of VLSI interconnect into the following three categories and discuss the results in each category in detail: (i) topology optimization for highperformance interconnects, including the algorithms for total wire length minimization, critical path length minimization, and delay minimization; (ii) device and interconnect sizing, including techniques for efficient driver, gate, and transistor sizing, optimal wire sizing, and simultaneous topology construction, buffer insertion, buffer and wire sizing; (iii) highperfbrmance clock routing, including abstract clock net topology generation and embedding, planar clock routing, buffer and wire sizing for clock nets, non-tree clock routing, and clock schedule optimization. For each method, we discuss its effectiveness, its advantages and limitations, as well as its computational efficiency. We group the related techniques according to either their optimization techniques or optimization objectives so that the reader can easily compare the quality and efficiency of different solutions.

this paper. Given the MOS circuit topology, the delay can be controlled byvarying the sizes of transistors in the circuit. Here, the size of a transistor is measured in terms of its channel width, since the channel lengths in a digital circuit are generally uniform. Roughly speaking, the sizes of certain transistors can be increased to reduce the circuit delay at the expense of additional chip area

Using explicit modeling of delays we present and discuss real design conditions of CMOS buffers from the viewpoint of power dissipation. Efficiency of buffer implementation is first studied through the definition of limit for buffer insertion. Closed form alternatives to the design for minimum power-delay product are then proposed in terms of this limit. Validations are obtained through SPICE simulations on two stage inverter arrays. Applications are given to standard cell library in comparing implementations for different selection alternatives. 1. Introduction Driving buffers have been extensively used to control delays on combinatorial paths. Values of tapering factors were determined depending on the performance modeling level and on the physical representation of the cells involved with a common objective: minimizing the delay of paths. In an initial simple theory Lin and Linholm [1] introduced the fixed tapered buffer where the minimum propagation delay time is achieved when the...

As very large scale integrated (VLSI) circuits move into the era of deepsubmicron (DSM) technology and gigahertz frequency, the system performance has increasingly become dominated by the interconnect delay. This dissertation presents five related research topics on interconnect layout optimization, and interconnect extraction and modeling: the multi-source wire sizing (MSWS) problem, the simultaneous transistor and interconnect sizing (STIS) problem, the global interconnect sizing and spacing (GISS) problem, the interconnect capacitance extraction problem, and the interconnect inductance extraction problems. Given a routing tree with multiple sources, the MSWS problem determines the optimal widths of the wire segments such that the delay is minimized. We reveal several interesting properties for the optimal MSWS solution, of which the most important is the bundled refinement property. Based on this property, we propose a polynomial time algorithm, which uses iterative bundled refinement operations to compute lower and upper bounds of an optimal solution. Since the algorithm often achieves identical lower and upper bounds in experiments, the optimal solution is obtained simply by the bound computation. Furthermore, this algorithm can be used for single-source wire sizing problem and runs 100x xxi faster than previous methods. It has replaced previous single-source wire sizing methods in practice.