Mission

The continuously decreasing dimensions of the features assembled on advanced integrated circuits and systems, together with more ambitious design styles (such as combined Analog/Digital chips and clock frequencies in the GHz-range) mandate a level of understanding, modeling and verification of various (parasitic) physical/electrical phenomena that exceeds by far the current state-of-the-art. We intend to bridge this knowledge gap.

In particular, the objectives of our research are concerned with answering the following questions that become ever more important because of the on-going increase of VLSI integration density:

• What are the most important global parasitic effects in a submicron VLSI chip and in what manner can these effects be described mathematically?
• How do we attain reliable models for these phenomena?
• In what manner is it possible to extract these models from the description of the technology and the layout of the chip?
• How can a designer verify her design and check its correct functioning in the presence of these phenomena?
• In what manner can a designer be supported in an optimal fashion?

In more concrete terms, we are working on the following subjects (a brief and non-complete listing):

• Accurate modeling and extraction of interconnect resistance, capacitance, inductance.
• Modeling of the substrate (crosstalk via the substrate).
• Extraction of full-custom bipolar and BiCMOS layouts, including accurate modeling of the bipolar devices.
• Model reduction.

Keywords and concepts that guide our research are:

• accuracy
• efficiency
• usefulness
• feedback from users and industry in general
• Verify and enhance our knowledge through prototype implementations in Space.

Many of the knowledge that we develop is tested and implemented in our layout-to-circuit extractor called Space.

• Space is part of the Nelsis IC Design system and of the OCEAN Sea-of-Gates design system (on top of Nelsis).
• A commercial version of Space is marketed (under the name OptEM Inspector) by the Canadian company OptEM Engineering.
• An evaluation/university version of Space can be obtained by clicking here.

We keep many of our papers on-line, they can be obtained by clicking here.