Introduction The exponential scaling of feature sizes in semiconductor technologies has side-effects on layout optimization, related to effects such as inter connect delay, noise and crosstalk, signal integrity, parasitics effects, and power dissipation, that invalidate the assumptions that form the basis of previous design methodologies and tools. This book is intended to sample the most important, contemporary, and advanced layout opti mization problems emerging with the advent of very deep submicron technologies in semiconductor processing. We hope that it will stimulate more people to perform research that leads to advances in the design and development of more efficient, effective, and elegant algorithms and design tools. Organization of the Book The book is organized as follows. A multi-stage simulated annealing algorithm that integrates floorplanning and interconnect planning is pre sented in Chapter 1. To reduce the run time, different interconnect plan ning approaches are applied in different ranges of temperatures. Chapter 2 introduces a new design methodology - the interconnect-centric design methodology and its centerpiece, interconnect planning, which consists of physical hierarchy generation, floorplanning with interconnect planning, and interconnect architecture planning. Chapter 3 investigates a net-cut minimization based placement tool, Dragon, which integrates the state of the art partitioning and placement techniques.

This book covers layout design and layout migration methodologies for optimizing multi-net wire structures in advanced VLSI interconnects. Scaling-dependent models for interconnect power, interconnect delay and crosstalk noise are covered in depth, and several design optimization problems are addressed, such as minimization of interconnect power under delay constraints, or design for minimal delay in wire bundles within a given routing area. A handy reference or a guide for design methodologies and layout automation techniques, this book provides a foundation for physical design challenges of interconnect in advanced integrated circuits.

This book presents an updated selection of the most representative contributions to the 2nd and 3rd IEEE Workshops on Signal Propagation on Interconnects (SPI) which were held in Travemtinde (Baltic See Side), Germany, May 13-15, 1998, and in Titisee-Neustadt (Black Forest), Germany, May 19-21, 1999. This publication addresses the need of developers and researchers in the field of VLSI chip and package design. It offers a survey of current problems regarding the influence of interconnect effects on the electrical performance of electronic circuits and suggests innovative solutions. In this sense the present book represents a continua tion and a supplement to the first book "Signal Propagation on Interconnects", Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1998. The papers in this book cover a wide area of research directions: Beneath the des cription of general trends they deal with the solution of signal integrity problems, the modeling of interconnects, parameter extraction using calculations and measurements and last but not least actual problems in the field of optical interconnects.

As prevailing copper interconnect technology advances to its fundamental physical limit, interconnect delay due to ever-increasing wire resistivity has greatly limited the circuit miniaturization. Carbon nanotube (CNT) interconnects have emerged as promising replacement materials for copper interconnects due to their superior conductivity. Buffer insertion for CNT interconnects is capable of improving circuit timing of signal nets with limited buffer deployment. However, due to the imperfection of fabricating long straight CNT, there exist significant unidimensional-spatially correlated variations on the critical CNT geometric parameters such as the diameter and density, which will act the circuit performance. This dissertation develops a novel timing driven buffer insertion technique considering unidimensional correlations of variations of CNT. Although the fabrication variations of CNTs are not desired for the circuit designs targeting performance optimization and reliability, these inherent imperfections make them natural candidates for building highly secure physical unclonable function (PUF), which is an advanced hardware security technology. A novel CNT PUF design through leveraging Lorenz chaotic system is developed and we show that it is resistant to many machine learning modeling attacks. In summary, the studies in this dissertation demonstrate that CNT technology is highly promising for performance and security optimizations in advanced VLSI circuit design.

As semiconductor technology advances in the ultra deep sub-micron era, on-chip global interconnections have been an ever-greater barrier to achieving high-performance and low-power for the increasingly larger system-on-chip (SoC) designs. Various on-chip interconnection schemes are proposed to tackle the scaling issue of global wires by manipulating the wire operation regions, changing signaling methods, and applying different equalization techniques. Optimization frameworks are also proposed to aid the transmitter-wire-receiver co-design based on user-defined constraints. For the six representative global interconnection schemes, we investigate their performance metrics with technology scaling by performing optimizations using the proposed SQP-based framework. A set of simple models is also developed to enable early-stage system-level analysis. Performance of different interconnection schemes are predicted and compared over several technology nodes. We further perform studies on the pipelined $RC$ interconnection by exploring its performance metrics with voltage and technology scaling based on different design objectives. A performance evaluation flow is developed to generate the optimal designs for given objectives. Also, impacts of pipelining depth, voltage and technology scaling are illustrated. Finally, we propose an energy-efficient high-speed on-chip global interconnection by employing continuous-time active equalization. Modeling and design of transmitter and receiver circuits are discussed. Analytical formula of received eye-opening is derived for system-level design planning. We further perform transmitter-receiver co-design through an optimization framework and explore the design space to generate design based on best energy-throughput tradeoff.