FastCap: a multipole accelerated 3-D capacitance extraction program

• Published in: IEEE transactions on computer-aided design of integrated circuits and systems Vol. 10; no. 11; pp. 1447 - 1459
• Main Authors: Nabors, K., White, J.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York, NY IEEE 01.11.1991; Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers
• Subjects: Acceleration; Applied sciences; Boundary element methods; Capacitance; Computational geometry; Conductors; Dielectrics; Electronics; Exact sciences and technology; Gaussian processes; Integral equations; Iterative algorithms; Iterative methods; Semiconductor electronics. Microelectronics. Optoelectronics. Solid state devices; Circuit design; Integrated circuit; Capacitance; Extraction; Algorithm; Spatial structure; Boundary element method
• ISSN: 0278-0070; 1937-4151
• DOI: 10.1109/43.97624

A fast algorithm for computing the capacitance of a complicated three-dimensional geometry of ideal conductors in a uniform dielectric is described and its performance in the capacitance extractor FastCap is examined. The algorithm is an acceleration of the boundary-element technique for solving the integral equation associated with the multiconductor capacitance extraction problem. The authors present a generalized conjugate residual iterative algorithm with a multipole approximation to compute the iterates. This combination reduces the complexity so that accurate multiconductor capacitance calculations grow nearly as nm, where m is the number of conductors. Performance comparisons on integrated circuit bus crossing problems show that for problems with as few as 12 conductors the multipole accelerated boundary element method can be nearly 500 times faster than Gaussian-elimination-based algorithms, and five to ten times faster than the iterative method alone, depending on required accuracy.< >