Capacitance Sensitivity Calculation for Interconnects by Adjoint Field Technique

This paper presents a new, efficient algorithm for capacitance sensitivity calculation w.r.t. geometric variations due to process imperfection of interconnects. Sensitivity calculation can be a very important step in variation-aware interconnect analysis. The algorithm is based on the adjoint field technique (AFT) derived from an application of Tellegen´s theorem for the electrostatic (ES) field. The algorithm relies on manipulating the intermediate data of a standard (without considering variations) capacitance extraction. Thus no additional costly computations are required, which makes the algorithm very efficient. The algorithm has been verified for 2D structures while the generalization for 3D structures is straightforward.