394 Progress In Electromagnetics Research Symposium 2007, Beijing, China, March 26-30 On High-capacity Computational Electromagnetic Solutions for Future High-speed IC Design Dan Jiao 1 , Changhong Dai 2 , and Shiuh-Wuu Lee 2 1 School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Purdue University, USA 2 Design & Technology Solutions, Intel Corporation, USA Abstract— IC design has been guided by circuit theory for more than three decades. As on-chip designers travel deeper and deeper into the submicron regime, computational electromagnetics, the science of solving Maxwell’s equations, has increasingly become essential for high-performance IC design. The reasons are three-fold: • Reduced feature sizes. At the 45 nm processing technology node and beyond, the IC in- dustry will have to print features that are several times less than the wavelength of light (193 nm) being used. In this regime, light does not propagate in straight lines. Instead, it is a wave. This induces extreme proximity effects, which need to be comprehended and compensated for by Optical Proximity Correction (OPC). OPC determines the photomask patterns that enable drawn layout features to be faithfully and accurately reproduced by optical lithography onto the wafer. It has emerged as one of the major gating factors in achieving efficient turnaround time for IC data preparation and high-yield manufacturing. The enabling technology of accurate model-guided OPC is computational electromagnetics. • Increased clock frequency. Currently the clock frequency of microprocessors is in the giga- hertz regime. Since it is necessary to analyze the chip response to harmonics 5 times the clock frequency, it is expected that interconnects would have to be analyzed with certain electromagnetic effects incorporated at high frequencies. In 2001, an Intel research team for the first time quantitatively demonstrated, via simulation and real silicon measurements, the importance of electromagnetic (EM) analysis at tens of GHz [1, 2]. This finding pushes on-chip designers to the verge of the transition from circuit-based design methodology to a field-based methodology that has full-wave electromagnetic accuracy. • Increased Integration of computing and communication. This calls for increasing levels of the integration of RF, analog, and digital circuits on the same chip, which leads often to undesirable coupling and sometimes to system failure. Prevailing circuit-based signal integrity paradigms are reaching their limits of predictive accuracy when applied to high- frequency mixed-signal settings. To sustain the scaling and integration of digital, analog, mixed-signal, and RF circuitry, a computational electromagnetic solution is indispensable. However, very large-scale IC design (1) demands very large scale electromagnetic solutions, and (2) imposes many unique modeling challenges that are totally new to the electromagnetic com- munity [3]. Therefore it is of paramount importance to develop innovative high-capacity compu- tational EM methods amenable for onchip problems so that the VLSI revolution can continue uninterrupted. In this talk, we will introduce a class of high-capacity computational electromagnetic methods being developed at Purdue University under the support of Intel Corporation. REFERENCES 1. Kobrinsky, M. J., S. Chakravarty, D. Jiao, M. Harmes, S. List, and M. Mazumder, “Experi- mental validation of crosstalk simulations for on-chip interconnects at high frequencies using S -parameters,” IEEE 12th Topical Meeting on Electrical Performance of Electronic Packaging (EPEP), 329-332, 2003. 2. Jiao, D., M. Mazumder, S. Chakravarty, C. Dai, M. Kobrinsky, M. Harmes, and S. List, “A novel technique for full-wave modeling of large-scale three-dimensional high-speed on/off-chip interconnect structures,” International Conference on Simulation of Semiconductor Proc. and Dev., 39–42, 2003. 3. Jiao, D., C. Dai, S.-W. Lee, T. R. Arabi, and G. Taylor, “Computational electromagnetics for high-frequency IC design,”IEEE International Symposium on Antennas and Propagation, invited paper, Vol. 3, 3317–3320, 2004.