FDTD-SPICE analysis of high-speed cells in silicon integrated circuits

This paper introduces FDTD-SPICE to the problem of Silicon integrated circuit (IC) analysis. The analyzed IC cell is decomposed into active and passive parts. The active part is analyzed using the circuit analysis approach of SPICE while the larger passive on-chip interconnect part is analyzed using the full wave finite difference time domain (FDTD) method. The two methods are coupled in the time domain at the connecting ports. All of the modes propagating on the metal-insulator-semiconductor (MIS) interconnect are taken into account accurately. The advantages of both the circuit and the full wave analysis approaches are retained while avoiding inaccuracies associated with the use of transforms or inverse transforms. The analysis procedure is illustrated on a few small IC cell layout examples.