A Novel Skin-Effect Based Surface Impedance Formulation for Broadband Modeling of 3-D Interconnects With Electric Field Integral Equation

The problem of interconnect modeling embedded in multilayered substrate is initially formulated in terms of the volume integral equation (IE) with respect to 3-D conduction current density. One out of three degrees of freedom in volumetric current variation is then eliminated by approximating the current behavior over the coordinate normal to the conductor surface according to the skin-effect. The remaining two degrees of freedom in the volumetric current variation constitute the unknown current distribution on the conductor surface for which a governing surface electric field integral equation is obtained directly from the volume IE via restriction of the volumetric operator´s range to the conductor surface. The resultant surface IE features a global to the conductor cross section surface impedance operator, which is shown to approximate the relationship between tangential electric and magnetic field components on the conductor surface. The proposed novel surface IE featuring multilayered media dyadic Green´s function is amenable to various discretization schemes including the Rao-Wilton-Glisson method of moments. In this paper the latter is implemented by casting the scattered field operator into Michalski-Zheng´s mixed-potential form in conjunction with enforcement of global relationships between the basis and testing functions in conductor cross sections according to the surface impedance operator. Numerical comparisons to alternative conductor loss models show that the method achieves volumetric solution accuracy within the framework of a boundary-element formulation.