Pad assignment with signal integrity optimization is very important for high-speed VLSI design. In this paper, an efficient method is proposed to effectively minimize both simultaneous switching noise and crosstalk that are inevitably caused by package inductance and capacitance during the design of high-speed/high-bandwidth circuits. Due to its efficiency, our algorithm can be incorporated into existing circuit floorplanning and placement schemes for the co-design of VLSI and packaging. For a set of industrial circuits/packages tested in our experiment, on the average, our method achieves a 16.8% reduction of total electrical noise when compared with the conventional design rule of thumb popularly used by circuit designers.
Kai-Yuan Chao, D. F. Wong