A practical approach to modeling skin effect in on-chip interconnects.

ABSTRACTA compact modeling methodology for the skin effect in conductors with rectangular cross section is presented. Possible equivalent circuit topologies are reviewed, and their calibration on numerical simulation is discussed, highlighting the shortcomings of conventional calibration procedures. A new approach, based on the direct fitting of the impedance transfer function to numerical simulations, is shown to offer excellent accuracy for a wide range of cross-sectional wire aspect ratios. The new formulation also obviates the need for separating the wire internal and external inductances which is a prerequisite for all published models. Finally, a practical implementation of the model as an RL parallel network is presented.