Sparsification of Dense Capacitive Coupling of Interconnect Models

Parasitic elements play a major role in advanced circuit design and pose considerable run-time and memory problems for the post-layout verification, especially in the case of full-chip extraction. This brief presents a realizable R(L)C(M)-netlist-in-R(L)C(M)-netlist-out method to sparsify and reduce the capacitive coupling parasitics in circuits with interconnect lines. The method is applicable in conjunction with partitioning-based model-order reduction algorithms to reduce the complete extracted netlists, or as a stand-alone tool to process only the capacitive coupling. It is shown that, by using the method, circuits with even dense capacitive coupling can be partitioned and reduced efficiently.