SIMULATION OF HIGH-SPEED INTERCONNECTS USING A CONVOLUTION-BASED HIERARCHICAL PACKAGING SIMULATOR

A specialized packaging simulator is presented which uses an impulse r esponse model of the interconnect network to model high speed digital systems. Behavioral models of drivers and receivers are used. A hierar chical strategy is developed which uses point modeling of discontinuit ies and the concept of coupling groups to facilitate tradeoffs between accuracy and run time. A new impulse response/convolution technique i s developed to efficiently handle large distributed interconnect netwo rks. With this technique, impulse response thresholding provides a smo oth transistion from delay modeling of interconnects to full distribut ed circuit simulation.