A new approach to selecting the cutting number in QMM-based capacitance extraction

The quasi-multiple medium (QMM) is a new idea in capacitance extraction for VLSI interconnects. It has been demonstrated that the QMM method can greatly increase the sparsity of the coefficient matrix produced by direct boundary element method (BEM). Therefore, the computational time and memory are greatly reduced. In this paper, a new approach, SMZ, is proposed to select the cutting number in QMM. With this approach, a reasonable parameter (m, n) is found automatically for the QMM decomposition of a multi-dielectric capacitor, so that the whole computing time is reduced further. Numerical results demonstrate the efficiency of the QMM enhanced by the SMZ approach.