CHIME: coupled hierarchical inductance model evaluation

Modeling inductive effects accurately and efficiently is a critical necessity for design verification of high performance integrated systems. While several techniques have been suggested to address this problem, they are mostly based on sparsification schemes for the L or L-inverse matrix. In this paper, we introduce CHIME, a methodology for non-local inductance modeling and simulation. CHIME is based on a hierarchical model of inductance that accounts for all inductive couplings at a linear cost, without requiring any window size assumptions for sparsification. The efficacy of our approach stems from representing the mutual inductive couplings at various levels of hierarchy, rather than discarding some of them. A prototype implementation demonstrates orders of magnitude speedup over a full, flat model and significant accuracy improvements over a truncated model. Importantly, this hierarchical circuit simulation capability produces a solution that is as accurate as the hierarchically extracted circuits, thereby providing a "golden standard" against which simpler truncation based models can be validated.