Extraction of circuit models for substrate cross-talk

An increasingly urgent topic for the realization of densely packed (mixed signal) integrated circuits is prevention of cross-talk via the substrate. The paper proposes a boundary element method (BEM) for calculating an admittance matrix for the substrate in order to analyze the parasitic coupling during layout verification. In contrast to standard BE methods, we propose a Green´s function which is specific to the domain and the problem. This allows minimal discretization and a direct extraction of circuit models for the cross-talk. The extraction can be combined with an efficient model reduction technique to obtain more simple, yet accurate models for the cross-talk. The complete extraction process has a linear time complexity and a constant memory usage. The method is fully implemented and integrated in an existing layout-to-circuit extractor.