IMPLEMENTATION OF A MULTICONDUCTOR TRANSMISSION-LINE MODEL IN A GENERAL-PURPOSE CIRCUIT SIMULATOR

The timing budget for inter-chip electrical interconnect becomes tight as the clock frequency of a high performance digital system increases. To meet the timing specifications it is essential to analyze the propagation delay of the electrical interconnect accurately, which requires including the full driver and receiver model (circuit files) and adequate transmission line model in the timing analysis. A general circuit simulator is needed in order to include the driver and receiver circuits which, in general, contain nonlinear active circuit elements. We have implemented the wave separation type multiconductor transmission line model in Intel's in-house circuit simulator TIM. In this paper we will present the details of implementation as well as a description of the algorithm. We will also compare the wave separation model to the distributed-lumped model, and present results from a number of simulation cases.