An efficient estimation method of dynamic power dissipation on VLSI interconnects

Abstract

Up to the present, there have been many works to analyze interconnects on timing aspects, while less works have been done on power aspects. As resistance of interconnects and rise time of signals decrease, power dissipation associated with interconnects is ever-increasing. Hence, an efficient method to compute power dissipation on interconnects is necessary and in this paper we propose a simple yet accurate method to estimate dynamic power dissipation on interconnects. We propose a new reduced-order model to estimate power dissipation on large interconnects. Through the proposed model which is directly derived from total capacitance and resistance of interconnects, we show that the dynamic power dissipation on whole interconnects can be approximated, and propose an analytic method to compute the power dissipation. The results of the proposed method applied to various RC networks show that maximum relative error is within 7% in comparison with HSPICE results.