A General Approach for Sensitivity Analysis of Distributed Interconnects in the Time Domain

With the continually increasing operating frequencies, simulation and optimization for signal integrity in high-speed designs is becoming increasingly important. In this paper, a novel and generic method for sensitivity analysis of distributed interconnects is developed. Advantages of the proposed method are that it is independent of the macromodel used to represent the interconnects, and it does not require the computation of the sensitivity of the macromodel components with respect to the interconnect parameter of interest. Various numerical examples are presented to demonstrate the validity, generality, and efficiency of the new method.