Stochastic analysis of interconnect delay in the presence of process variations

Process variations can reduce the accuracy in estimation of interconnect performance. This work presents a process variation based stochastic model and proposes an effective analytical method to estimate interconnect delay. The technique decouples the stochastic interconnect segments by an improved decoupling method. Combined with a polynomial chaos expression (PCE), this paper applies the stochastic Galerkin method (SGM) to analyze the system response. A finite representation of interconnect delay is then obtained with the complex approximation method and the bisection method. Results from the analysis match well with those from SPICE. Moreover, the method shows good computational efficiency, as the running time is much less than the SPICE simulation's.