Performance-driven physical design is becoming more important as advances in IC technologies enable gigahertz operating frequencies. These same IC technologies, however, exhibit dominant interconnect resistance, non-negligible coupling capacitance, and even the potential for inductance effects, which makes the performance modeling and prediction more difficult. In this tutorial paper we will overview some of the existing timing metrics that are suitable for use during physical design, and introduce new metrics and directions for future work.
Lawrence T. Pileggi