9309179 Gedney The purpose of this project is the development of techniques that will provide the fullwave analysis of complex electrical interconnect networks of VLSI packages. To facilitate the accelerated development of high performance VLSI devices, accurate and efficient analysis tools are essential for the proper design of the electronic interconnects. Principally, these methods will provide, 1) the extraction of transmission-line equivalent circuit parameters over a broad frequency range, 2) the modeling of coupling between interconnect etchs, signal lines, leads, or other coupled lines in complex environments, and 3) accurate simulations of pulse propagation on three-dimensional interconnect networks. The proposed analysis techniques are based on: i) a generalized Yee-algorithm based on unstructured grids, and ii) a time- domain finite element method based on higher-order vector elements. These methods are extremely robust, and are capable of simulating temporal field in complex environment, as well as being highly computationally efficient. Furthermore, they are designed to be interfaced with computer aided modeling and tools to facilitate the design engineer. The simulation of complex electrical interconnect networks will lead to sizable problems with potentially 109 degree of freedom. To facilitate problems of this scale, efficient prarallel algorithms are proposed. Specifically, spatial decomposition techniques will be used for both the generalized Yee- algorithm and the time domain finite element method, while efficient iterative matrix solution algorithms based on domain decomposition methods, e.g., additive Schwarz methods with a coarse preconditioner based on a wire-basket based method, will be studied for the time-domain finite element method approach. ***
