Delay analysis of buffer inserted sub-threshold interconnects

In this paper, an analysis of interconnect delay minimization by CMOS buffer insertion in sub-threshold regime is presented. Analytical expressions are developed to calculate the total delay and optimum number of buffers required for delay minimization in sub-threshold interconnects. Considering delay minimization by buffer insertion, the effects of voltage-scaling on the delay and optimum number of buffers have been analyzed. It is demonstrated that voltage scaling in sub-threshold regime reduces the number of buffers required to attain the minimum delay. This is one more advantage of voltage-scaling in addition to the usual reduction in power dissipation, in the sense that lesser silicon area is consumed. For a wide variety of typical interconnect loads, analytically obtained results are in good agreement with SPICE extracted results for most of the cases more than 90 %. Finally, the variability analysis of sub-threshold interconnects is investigated using Monte Carlo analysis.