3-D capacitance extraction of IC interconnects using field solvers and homogenization technique

In the extraction and simulation of integrated circuit (IC) chips using electromagnetic field solvers, one of the difficulties is the modeling of the multilayered dielectric structures. The consideration of these thin layers in the field solvers dramatically increases the memory and the computation time. This paper presents a numerical homogenization strategy of multilayered dielectric media that allows removing the dielectric layers from the field solver models. A technique that transforms the homogenized anisotropic materials to isotropic ones is also developed. The homogenization strategy has been applied in both the finite-element method and a fast multipole expansion accelerated boundary-element method. The validation is accomplished through examples of capacitance extraction on a real digital IC chip.