Minimum Area Shield Insertion for Inductive Noise Reduction

5.6 Summary

We have formulated the min-area shield insertion problem to satisfy inductive noise constraints. We have presented an efficient algorithm that minimizes the number of shields needed to satisfy noise constraints. The algorithm complexity is found to be of O (N²), where N is the number of horizontal segments in the layout. The main idea of the algorithm was to postpone the actual shield insertion until all required shields are identified, and then find the intersection of all the ranges to minimize the number of shields (area) needed to satisfy the noise constraints. The run time to optimize a 32-segment bus has been reported to be < 1 sec with no noise violations in the result. The algorithm has shown to be flexible and give good results for different geometries, different noise bounds and different sensitivity rates.