This paper describes a high-speed D/A converter design for mixed-mode systems. Capacitive coupling induced by inter-chip interconnects and time-variant clock skew between ICs should be considered for mixed-mode systems, and on-chip interconnects should be treated as transmission lines in the circuit simulation as operating speed reaches GHz range. A robust FIFO built in the D/A converter can absorb input data timing variance due to the capacitive coupling and the clock timing skew, the worst-case margin of which is 1.5TCLK. Distributed RLC transmission line models for on-chip interconnects produce accurate simulation results at 1 GHz clock frequency over lumped models. For optimized D/A converter design, behavioral modeling methodology is also presented in this paper. Measurement results verify the accuracy of the on-chip interconnect and behavioral models.

As scaling has been continued more than 20 years, it has yielded faster and denser chips with ever increasing functionality. The scaling will continue down to or beyond 0.1 µm as proposed in SIA Technical Road map. With scaling, device performance improves, however, interconnect performance is degraded. In this scaled deep submicron technology, however, interconnects limit the performance, packing density and yield, if not properly modeled. In order to properly model and design the interconnect-dominated circuits, accurate and proper interconnect modeling is a must to assure the performance and functionality of ever-increasing complex multi-million transistor VLSI circuits. In this paper, the overall flow of interconnect modeling in IC design is reviewed including interconnect characterization, various 2-D/3-D field solvers, 2-D/3-D interconnect model library generation, and parameter extraction. And advanced topics of interconnect modeling in deep submicron are reviewed; statistical interconnect modeling.