Decreasing slew rates and efforts to reduce the resistance-capacitance (RC)
delays of on-chip interconnect through design and technology have resulted
in the growing importance of inductance in analyzing interconnect response
for timing and noise analysis. In this paper, we consider a practical appr
oach for extracting approximate inductances of on-chip interconnect. This a
pproach, which,ve call the method of return-limited inductances, is based o
n performing the inductance modeling of signal lines and power-ground lines
independently and on taking advantage of the power and ground distribution
of the chip to localize inductive coupling. A set of simple geometry-based
matrix decomposition rules guide sparsification in these extractions.