Three Layer Routing for Reliability Enhancement

In this paper we study two important reliability issues in deep submicron VLSI design, namely antenna eeect and crosstalk noise, in the context of three-layer channel routing. Cost functions for both of the failure mechanisms are introduced and based on these cost models, reliability enhancement techniques are presented. For antenna eeect minimization, a layer reassignment algorithm is adopted while for crosstalk minimization, an algorithm that combines layer reassignment and track reassignment is presented. Experimental results show that these algorithms can reduce the antenna eeect and the crosstalk noise considerably without increasing the routing area. The relationship between these two objectives has also been studied and a technique for optimizing them simultaneously is proposed.