Model order reduction for multi-terminal circuits

Analysis of effects due to parasitics is of vital importance during the design of large-scale integrated circuits, since it gives insight into how circuit performance is affected by undesired parasitic effects. Due to the increasing amount of interconnect and metal layers, parasitic extraction and simulation may become very time consuming or even unfeasible. Developments are presented, for reducing systems describing R and RC netlists resulting from parasitic extraction. The methods exploit tools from graph theory to improve sparsity preservation especially for circuits with multi-terminals. Circuit synthesis is applied after model reduction, and the resulting reduced netlists are tested with industrial circuit simulators. With the novel RC reduction method SparseMA, experiments show reduction of 95% in the number of elements and 68x speed-up in simulation time.