ABSTRACT
Integrated circuits (ICs) mainly consist of transistors and interconnects. Normally, we are more interested in the transistors and how they are combined to form logic gates, flip-flops, memories, and other functional units. Interconnects are easily overlooked because they are just nodes in a circuit diagram; but interconnects are responsible for all communication between logical gates, functional units, and subsystems and are, therefore, of crucial importance. In reality, interconnects are one or several wires with various lengths, which connect transistors and blocks over various distances. Their behavior strongly depends on their lengths. When discussing power consumption, interconnect tends to dominate the power consumption, due to their large total capacitance [1-3]. In Liu and Svensson [2], 30 to 40% of the power consumed by a chip (input/output, I/O, excluded) is estimated to be related to interconnect and an additional 40% to the clock distribution (of which some half is related to the wires). In Chandra et al. [3], about 70% of the power of a high-performance chip (microprocessor) is estimated to be related to interconnect and clock in the 180-nm technology node. It is, therefore, well motivated to consider interconnect power separately.
