Delay and crosstalk simulation of high-speed VLSI interconnects with nonlinear terminations

A method for analysis of VLSI interconnects that contain both lossy coupled transmission lines and nonlinear components is presented. An equivalent time-domain macromodel is derived for the linear subnetworks that contain lossy coupled transmission lines. The macromodel takes the form of a set of ordinary differential equations. The method takes full advantages of the asymptotic waveform evaluation (AWE) technique, which offers two to three orders of magnitude speed-up relative to other methods with comparable accuracy. In addition, it does not require explicit evaluation of the dominant poles of the network. The proposed technique can be easily implemented within the framework of an existing conventional circuit simulator such as SPICE