Design of tapered buffers with local interconnect capacitance

This paper presents a design methodology and analytic relationships for the optimal tapering of cascaded buffers which consider the effects of local interconnect capacitance. The method, constant capacitance-to-current ratio tapering (C/sup 3/RT), is based on maintaining the capacitive load to current drive ratio constant, and therefore, the propagation delay of each buffer stage also remains constant. Reductions in power dissipation of up to 22% and reductions in active area of up to 46%, coupled with reductions in propagation delay of up to 2%, as compared with tapered buffers which neglect local interconnect capacitance, are exhibited for an example buffer system.< >