Boundary-element approach to transient simulation of three-dimensional integrated circuit interconnect

Abstract

It has been recently suggested that sufficiently accurate integrated circuit cross-talk simulations can be performed by computing the time evolution of electric fields both inside and outside three-dimensional integrated circuit conductors via a finite-difference discretization of Laplace's equation. In this paper the same calculation is performed, but the volume mesh associated with finite-difference methods is avoided through the use of a boundary-element method in which only conductor surfaces are discretized. Two boundary-element approaches are investigated, and it is shown that the straight-forward approach leads to unacceptable discretization errors, and a less intuitive second approach yields good results even with coarse surface meshes. Finally, numerical experiments demonstrating the effectiveness of the second approach in calculating cross-talk are presented.