Managing inductive coupling in wide signal busses

Recent advances in deep sub-micron (DSM) design and manufacturing technologies have considerably increased the importance of inductive coupling effects for long interconnect such as global signal busses in high performance microprocessors. Inductive coupling has been shown to depend directly on the overlap length, signal activity and separating distance for adjacent signal wires. In this paper we present a solution through a process known as swizzling; where the order of signal wires in the bus is continuously re-arranged to move attackers and victims away from each other. We also show that this technique significantly reduces the inductive coupling for the most vulnerable wires neighboring the attacker with zero area and routing resource penalty and without negatively impacting the wires´ capacitive coupling.