A study on impact of aggressor de-rating in the context of multiple crosstalk effects in circuits

ABSTRACT

Capacitive crosstalk induced signal integrity effects have been studied for over a decade. A typical victim net has multiple aggressors. In worst-case analysis of crosstalk effects, it is customary to assume that (i) all aggressors can switch at the same time and (ii) aggressors themselves are not subject to other crosstalk effects. Further refinements of the worst-case analysis consider (a) Boolean filtering of the aggressors to take logical relationship among them into account and (b) timing filtering to exclude aggressors that cannot switch in the same timing window where the victim node is switching. However, even further refinement is possible by relaxing supposition (ii) above that assumes that aggressors are not subject to noise themselves. In this paper, we present a simulation study that considers multiple crosstalk effects where the aggressors of one net can be victim themselves with signals switching in their neighborhood. The simulations are performed on an innovative compact model that permits circular reasoning in an event-driven, non-zero gate delay, and dynamic simulation framework. Results indicate that when crosstalk on aggressors is also considered while processing crosstalk on a victim, the impact is often mitigated substantially.

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INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  B. Hardware
  B.8 Performance and Reliability
      B.8.1 Reliability, Testing, and Fault-Tolerance

General Terms:
Experimentation, Measurement, Reliability

Keywords:
capacitive cross-coupling, dynamic simulation., static analysis