LEONIDAS: Interconnect Oriented Design of Application Specific Circuits

Successfully designing a circuit in the deep-submicron area makes it necessary not only to optimize the way in which functionality by logic circuitry is realized, but also to design an optimal system of interconnects. In the opinion of the partners of the "LEONIDAS" projects, this can be achieved by giving the interconnect system the proper consideration in the overall design process. Consequently, the interconnects can no longer exclusively be viewed as being some kind of obstacle that only needs verification after the design of the layout has been done. Instead, providing the interconnects has to become an integral and important part of the applied flow itself. In view of the decreased feature sizes and the changed requirements of the design, new models for the accurate, quick, and reliable characterization of interconnects for the parameter extraction and estimation are needed. Yield optimization and its impact on signal propagation on the interconnects must be considered as well. In particular, the influence of fill structures or optical proximity corrections need to be considered. Another central topic is the consideration and handling of complex interconnect-related constraints in placement and routing tools for layout generation. Current tools must be extended to account for much more complex constraints than previously known. Finally, putting all the new developments together in an application specific flow is a challenging task in itself. Designing automotive applications, multimedia systems, or DRAM circuits poses rather different requirements which need to be considered in providing a new design methodology.

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