A Crosstalk-Aware Timing Prediction Method in Routing

Abstract: With shrinking interconnect spacing in advanced technology nodes, existing timing predictions become less precise due to the challenging quantification of crosstalk-induced delay. During the routing, the crosstalk effect is typically modeled by predicting coupling capacitance with congestion information. However, the timing estimation tends to be overly pessimistic, as the crosstalk-induced delay depends not only on the coupling capacitance but also on the signal arrival time. This work presents a crosstalk-aware timing estimation method using a two-step machine learning approach. Interconnects that are physically adjacent and overlap in signal timing windows are filtered first. Crosstalk delay is predicted by integrating physical topology and timing features without relying on post-routing results and the parasitic extraction. Experimental results show a match rate of over 99% for identifying crosstalk nets compared to the commercial tool on the OpenCores benchmarks, with prediction results being more accurate than those of other state-of-the-art methods.