A new shielding scheme, active shielding, is proposed for reducing delays on interconnects. As opposed to conventional (passive) shielding, the active shielding approach helps to speed up signal propagation on a wire by ensuring in-phase switching of adjacent nets. Results show that the active shielding scheme improves performance by up to 16% compared to passive shields and up to 29% compared to unshielded wires. When signal slopes at the end of the line are compared, savings of up to 38% and 27% can be achieved when compared to passive shields and unshielded wires, respectively.
['Himanshu Kaul', 'Dennis Sylvester', 'David Blaauw']
Active shields: a new approach to shielding global wires