Shielding area optimization under the solution of interconnect crosstalk

As the technology advances into deep sub-micron era, crosstalk reduction is of paramount importance for signal integrity. Simultaneous shield insertion and net ordering (SINO) has been shown to be effective to reduce both capacitive and inductive coupling. Although shield insertion could reduce crosstalk efficiently, a large scale of unnecessary shields will bring the shielding area problem which is also critical for an efficient SINO algorithm. In this paper, we propose three novel algorithms using fewer shields to solve SINO problem: namely, net coloring (NC), efficient middle shield insertion (EMSI) and NC+EMSI. Compared to the corresponding algorithms in previous work, our algorithms can reduce shielding area largely with short runtime.