Abstract:
 
Rough surfaces are pervasive in integrated circuits and systems at both
on-chip and off-chip levels. They are caused mainly by the imperfection
in manufacturing processes such as electroplating and etching. And they
can lead to serious performance degradation. For example, extensive
experiments have shown that surface roughness can cause the conduction
loss on the printed circuit boards to increase by a factor of 3 at high
frequencies. 
 
The calculation of the equivalent circuit elements of complicated 3D
interconnect structures, so called parasitic extraction, has become a
mature sub-field in EDA research and industry. The integral equation
based methods have been proven to be the most powerful approaches. But
so far the surfaces of those 3D structures have always been assumed to
be perfectly smooth. The presence of surface roughness changes the
nature of the problem and has unfortunately raised the numerical
difficulty of the parasitic extraction to such a new level that even 
the
state-of-the-art parasitic extraction algorithms are not able to handle
practical structures. 
 
In this talk, I will show
- Why the rough surface problem is important
- A quick review of integral equation based parasitic extraction 
solvers
- Why these solvers fail to efficiently solve the rough surface problem
- The key elements in the proposed fast stochastic integral equation
solver (FastSies)
- The potential applications of FastSies in high frequency
electromagnetic analysis of 3D structures with rough surfaces