High-precision interconnect analysis

Integrated circuits have evolved to a stage where interconnections significantly limit their performance and functional complexity. We introduce a set of tools to perform highly accurate three-dimensional capacitance and resistance/thermal calculations of interconnect structures. We automatically generate these structures from layout information and is given process description. The main enhancement of our work is that we extract the interconnect characteristics after a complete and accurate topography simulation with previous optional lithography analysis, instead of elementary geometric blocks derived from simple analytical models. The capacitance and resistance/thermal extractor simulators are based on optimized finite-element methods, and the topography simulators use a cellular data-based approach.