Signal Delay in RC Tree Networks
Summary (2 min read)
Introduction
- In ~S integrated circuits, a given inverter or logic node may drive several gates, some of them through long wires whose distributed resistance and capacitance may not be negligible.
- The work reported here has led to a computationally simple technique for finding upper and lower bounds for the delay.
- The resistance of the metal line is neglected, but its parasitic capacitance remains.
- Capacitances associated with the pullup source diffusion, contact cuts, and the gates being driven are included.
- The work reported here actually applies to voltage sources other than steps, and an example appears below with a saturated ramp input source.
Analysis
- Consider any resistor tree with no node at ground.
- For simplicity the 18th Design Automation Conference Paper 30.2 examples in this paper involve only lumped resistors and capacitors and uniform RC lines.
- The tree representing the signal path is driven at the input with a unit step voltage.
- It is assumed that the output voltages cannot be calculated easily.
- For the moment consider only lumped capacitors; the theory is similar if the distributed lines are considered also.
The resistance
- Rke is defined as the resistance of the portion of the path between the input and e, that is common with the path between the input and node k.
- The sum (over all the capacitors in the network) different output nodes, Tp is the same for all outputs.
- TDe i Tp. (4) For nonuniform RC lines (i.e., RC trees without side branches) TDe = Tp. A detailed derivation [I] has the dimensions of time, and is equal to the first-order moment of the impulse response, which has been called "delay" by Elmore [3] .
- The general form of all these bounds is illustrated in Figure 4 . 17) it can be seen that bounds for the ramp response can be obtained simply by integrating the unit step bounds.
Practical Algorithms
- One way to use the inequalities of the previous sections is to consider the overall RC tree, and compute for each capacitor the appropriate Rke and Rkk so that Tp, TDe , and TRe for each output can be found.
- Of course for distributed lines the sums are replaced by appropriate integrals.
- The calculations necessary for each output require time proportional to the square of the number of elements.
- An alternate approach is to build up the network by construction, and calculate independently for each of the partially constructed networks enough information to permit the final calculation of Tp, TDe , and TRe.
- Programs that implement this approach appear elsewhere, in both a restricted form [2] and a more general form [I] .
Conclusions
- A computationally efficient method for calculating the signal delay through MOS interconnect lines with fanout has been described.
- Tight upper and lower bounds for the step response of RC trees have been presented.
- Linear-time algorithms exist for calculating these bounds from an algebraic description of the tree.
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Citations
1,800 citations
Cites background or methods from "Signal Delay in RC Tree Networks"
...The first-order step response approximation in Fig. 7 exhibits an error which may be unacceptable for some delay applications....
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...In [ 7 ], what corresponds to a first-order AWE response waveform is bounded to what are sometimes overly pessimistic max/min values....
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...For many MOS circuits, timing analyzers [ 11, [3] are often able to predict the interconnect delay with a simplified model, typically an RC tree [ 7 ], to within 10 percent of a SPICE [8] simulation prediction....
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...Equation (60) is compared with the SPICE response for this circuit in Fig. 7 ....
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...Moreover, for simple circuits such as RC trees, the steady-state solution is explicit and the first moment, or Elmore delay can be determined by a tree walk of the circuit graph [ 7 ]....
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1,224 citations
Cites methods from "Signal Delay in RC Tree Networks"
...Spectrumware software radio [8,9]; specifications such as the Bluetooth communications protocol [10], the GSM Vocoder [11], and the AMPS cellular base station[12]; and almost any application developed with Microsoft’s DirectShow library [13], Real Network’s RealSDK [14] or Lincoln Lab’s Polymorphous Computing Architecture [15]....
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Cites background from "Signal Delay in RC Tree Networks"
...These are all based on gate delay models that are compatible with geometric programming; see [85, 131, 146, 130, 1] for more on such models....
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References
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