This book was motivated by the problems being faced with shrinking IC process feature sizes. It is well known that as process feature sizes shrink, a host of electrical problems like cross-talk, electromigration, self-heat, etc. are becoming important. Cross-talk is one of the major problems since it results in unpredictable design behavior. In particular, it can result in significant delay variation or signal integrity problems in a wire, depending on the state of its neighboring wires. Typical approaches to tackle the cross-talk problem attempt to fix the problem once it is created. In our approach, we ensure that cross-talk is eliminated by design. The work described in this book attempts to take an "outside-the-box" view and propose a radically different design style. This design style first imposes a fixed layout pattern (or fabric) on the integrated circuit, and then embeds the circuit being implemented into this fabric. The fabric is chosen carefully in order to eliminate the cross-talk problem being faced in modem IC processes. With our choice of fabric, cross-talk between adjacent wires on an IC is reduced by between one and two orders of magnitude. In this way, the fabric concept eliminates cross-talk up-front, and by design. We propose two separate design flows, each of which uses the fabric concept to implement logic. The first flow uses fabric-compliant standard cells as an im­ plementation vehicle. We call these cells fabric cells, and they have the same logic functionality as existing standard cells with which they are compared.

1. Introduction.- 1.1 Cross-talk in DSM IC Design.- 1.2 Book Overview.- 1.3 Book Outline.- 2. Validating Deep Sub-Micron Effects.- 2.1 Chapter Overview.- 2.2 Trends in DSM VLSI Interconnect.- 2.3 Predicting VLSI Process Technology Trends.- 2.4 Extracting On-chip Layout Parasitics.- 2.5 Validating Cross-talk Effects.- 2.6 Review of Existing Techniques.- 2.7 Chapter Summary.- 3. VLSI Layout Fabrics.- 3.1 Chapter Overview.- 3.2 Our Dense Wiring Fabric (DWF).- 3.3 Advantages.- 3.4 Disadvantages.- 3.5 Chapter Summary.- 4. Fabric1 - Fabric Cell Based Design.- 4.1 Chapter Overview.- 4.2 Design Flow 1.- 4.3 Design Flow 2.- 4.4 Chapter Summary.- 5. Fabric3 - Network of PLA Based Design.- 5.1 Chapter Overview.- 5.2 Programmable Logic Arrays.- 5.3 Networks of Programmable Logic Arrays.- 5.4 Synthesis Algorithms for the Network of PLAs Methodology.- 5.5 Design Flow 1.- 5.6 Design Flow 2.- 5.7 Discussion.- 5.8 Chapter Summary.- 6. Wire Removal in a Network of PLAS.- 6.1 Chapter Overview.- 6.2 Binary SPFDs.- 6.3 MV-SPFDs.- 6.4 Experimental Results.- 6.5 Chapter Summary.- 7. Conclusions and Future Directions.- 7.1 Conclusions.- 7.2 Future Work.- Appendices.- Standard Cells.