Controlling Inductive Coupling in Wide Global Signal Busses Through Swizzling

Abstract

Recent advances in Deep Submicron (DSM) design and manufacturing technologies have brought to the forefront the importance of inductive coupling amongst long interconnect in high performance microprocessors. Inductive coupling has been shown to depend directly on the overlap length between adjacent signal wires, the activity on these wires and the distance separating them. This paper presents a technique--known as swizzling--that exploits the inductive coupling dependence on distance to reduce the effect of any particular attacker on any of its victims. In the swizzling technique, the order of signal wires in global signal busses is continuously re-arranged to move attackers and victims away from each other. This paper shows that this technique significantly reduces the inductive coupling for the most vulnerable wires neighboring the attacker with zero area and routing resource penalty.