Analysis of the impacts of signal rise/fall time and skew variations in coupled-RLC interconnects

Abstract

This paper investigates the impacts of signal rise/fall time and signal skew variations on voltage overshoot and propagation delay in inductive lines for different switching patterns. Equivalent circuit model parameters have been extracted using FastCap and FastHenry field solvers, and results have been obtained by HSpice simulator. Most existing works study the different switching patterns considering only constant rise/fall time and signal skew. However, here it is observed that variation of rise/fall time and skew alters the inductive behavior under different switching patterns. The investigation in this paper reveals that switching patterns start showing significant impact for a particular range of rise/fall times, and cross talk noise reduces with growing signal skew.