Wire sizing alternative

Abstract

To achieve minimum signal propagation delay, the nonuniform wire width routing architecture has been widely used in modern VLSI design. The non-uniform routing architecture exploits the wire width flexibilities to trade area for performance. However, many additional design rules, which confine the routing flexibilities, are introduced in nanoscale circuit designs. With the increasing difficulties of fabricating nanoscale circuits, the conventional nonuniform routing architecture becomes clumsy. We propose an uniform dual-rail routing architecture to cope with these new challenges. The proposed architecture exploits the anti-Miller effect between two adjacent wires with the same signal source. Hence, the coupling capacitance between these two wires is reduced. The simulation results demonstrate that our proposed architecture provides a signal propagation channel with similar propagation delay, less crosstalk noise, and less power consumption to the conventional non-uniform routing architecture with moderate routing area overheads. In terms of the properties and the scalabilities, we argue that the uniform dual-rail routing architecture is a wire sizing alternative without incurring layout irregularity and stacked vias overheads.