An efficient method for terminal reduction of interconnect circuits considering delay variations

Abstract

This paper proposes a novel method to efficiently reduce the terminal number of general linear interconnect circuits with a large number of input and/or output terminals considering delay variations. Our new algorithm is motivated by the fact that VLSI interconnect circuits have many similar terminals in terms of their timing and delay metrics due to their closeness in structure or due to mathematic approximation using meshing in finite difference or finite element scheme during the extraction process. By allowing some delay tolerance or variations, we can reduce many similar terminals and keep a small number of representative terminals. After terminal reduction, traditional model order reduction methods can achieve more compact models and improve simulation efficiency. The new method, TermMerg, is based on the moments of the circuits as the metrics for the timing or delay. It then employs singular value decomposition (SVD) method to determine the optimum number of clusters based on the low-rank approximation. After this, the K-means clustering algorithm is used to cluster the moments of the terminals into different clusters. Experimental results on a number of real industry interconnect circuits demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.