Application of the Finite Element Method to Determine the Electrical Resistance, Inductance, Capacitance parameters for the Circuit Package Enviornment

A finite-element program, Fierce, is used to obtain representative R, L, C electrical parameters for various two-dimensional conductor/dielectric packaging structures. The calculated results of Fierce are compared with an existing program C2D and correlated to hardware measurements. Specific advantages of Fierce are cited for ,modeling complex multilevel wiring packages with mixed dielectrics and several grounds. The concluding example demonstrates the capability of Fierce to characterize nine conductor--five dielectric model(s). The R, L, C outputs are inputed to a circuit analysis program, Astap, to compare the performance advantage of a ground plane located close to the conductors versus a far ground plane for a high performance application (800 ps driver switching speeds).