A preconditioned waveform relaxation solver for Signal Integrity analysis of high-speed channels

This work presents a fast transient solver for Signal Integrity analysis of high-speed channels. We consider general chip-to-chip coupled interconnect structures, including arbitrary discontinuities at chip, package and board level. An external characterization of the interconnect in terms of tabulated scattering frequency samples is first converted to a closed-form macromodel, whose transient effects on input signals can be computed very efficiently through recursive convolutions. When combined with suitable models for drivers and receivers, a large-scale but very sparse system of equations is obtained. The latter is solved by an iterative scheme based on the Generalized Minimal RESidual (GMRES) method, further enhanced by a preconditioner based on Waveform-Relaxation. Contrary to previous formulations, the proposed scheme is guaranteed to converge in few iterations. Numerical examples show that the proposed solver outperforms standard SPICE in terms of runtime, with no loss of accuracy.