Microelectronic interconnect modeling with a periodical lumped RLC-network

Authors: BLAISE RAVELO

Abstract: A modeling of high-speed microelectronic interconnections based on periodical resistor-inductor-capacitor (RLC) cells is presented in this paper. A theoretical investigation enabling one to determine the interconnect structure transfer function is established. The proposed theory is based on the use of the ABCD matrix product of elementary cells, constituting the whole interconnect structure. After extracting the constituting lumped elements R, L, and C, which model the considered interconnection, examples of the numerical validations were proposed, both in the frequency and time domains. It was demonstrated that by considering a structure comprised of 10 elementary segments in cascade, S-parameters and time-domain results were perfectly well correlated with the microstrip interconnection electromagnetic/circuit cosimulations performed with SPICE. It was verified that by considering input square wave data with several Gigasymbols/s rates, the introduced method enables the achieving of relative errors lower than 1% when the number of used cells is higher than 10. In addition, the sensitivity of the model in the function of the interconnect line length is investigated. The proposed model permits one to accurately predict the behavior of radio frequency/microelectronic interconnection responses for different signal integrity parameters of the interconnection line load values.

Keywords: Discrete modeling method, high-speed interconnections, microelectronic application, RLC-model, signal integrity

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