ABSTRACT
Interconnect means the wires linking together transistors, circuits, cell, modules, and systems as well. It plays an important role in any very-large-scale integration (VLSI) or digital system because it controls timing, power, noise, design functionality, and reliability. Interconnect in a VLSI or digital system mainly provides power delivery paths, clock delivery paths, and signal delivery paths. Power delivery paths distribute power to every element in the system and provides appropriate return paths, clock delivery paths deliver global or local clocks to storage elements, such as latches and flip-flops, or dynamic logic blocks, and signal delivery paths provide the communication capability among circuit elements and/or modules. For multiple-processor systems, a more complicated interconnect network referred to as a network-on-a-chip (NoC) technique is widely used.
