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DEPACT: Delay Extraction-Based Passive Compact Transmission-Line Macromodeling Algorithm

Natalie M. Nakhla, Student Member, IEEE, Anestis Dounavis, Member, IEEE, Ramachandra Achar, Senior Member, IEEE, and Michel S. Nakhla, Fellow, IEEE

AbstractWith the continually increasing operating frequencies, signal integrity and interconnect analysis in high-speed designs is becoming increasingly important. Recently, several algorithms were proposed for macromodeling and transient analysis of distributed transmission line interconnect networks. The techniques such as method-of-characteristics (MoC) yield fast transient results for long delay lines. However, they do not guarantee the passivity of the macromodel. It has been demonstrated that preserving passivity of the macromodel is essential to guarantee a stable global transient simulation. On the other hand, methods such as matrix rational approximation (MRA) provide efcient macromodels for lossy coupled lines, while preserving the passivity. However, for long lossy delay lines this may require higher order approximations, making the macromodel inefcient. To address the above difculties, this paper presents a new algorithm for passive and compact macromodeling of distributed transmission lines. The proposed method employs delay extraction prior to approximating the exponential stamp to generate compact macromodels, while ensuring the passivity. Validity and efciency of the proposed algorithm is demonstrated using several benchmark examples. Index TermsCircuit simulation, delay extraction, distributed interconnects, high-speed modules, matrix rational approximation (MRA), method of characteristics (MoC), multiconductor transmission lines, passive macromodels, printed circuit boards, transient analysis.

Fig. 1. Comparison of transmission line stamp.

obtained from MoC and the distributed

I. INTRODUCTION

HE RAPID increase in operating speeds, density, and complexity of modern integrated circuits has made interconnect analysis a requirement for all state-of-the-art circuit simulators. Interconnect effects such as ringing, signal delay, distortion, and crosstalk can severely degrade signal integrity. Interconnections can be from various levels of design hierarchy, such as on-chip, packaging structures, multichip modules (MCMs), printed circuit boards (PCBs), and backplanes. As the frequency of operation increases, the interconnect lengths become a signicant fraction of the operating wavelength, and conventional lumped models become inadequate in describing

Manuscript received February 15, 2004; revised June 29, 2004. This work was supported in part by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC), by Micronet, a Canadian Network of Centers of Excellence on Microelectronics, by the Canadian Microelectronics Corporation (CMC), and by the Gennum Corporation, Ottawa. N. M. Nakhla, R. Achar, and M. S. Nakhla are with the Department of Electronics, Carleton University, Ottawa, ON K1S 5B6, Canada (e-mail: nnakhla@doe.carleton.ca; achar@doe.carleton.ca; msn@doe.carleton.ca). A. Dounavis is with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Western Ontario, London, ON N6A 5B9, Canada (e-mail: adounavis@eng.uwo.ca). Digital Object Identier 10.1109/TADVP.2004.841677

the interconnect performance and transmission line models become necessary. Skin and proximity effects also become prominent at higher frequencies and distributed models with frequency-dependent parameters may be needed [1]. The major difculty usually encountered while linking distributed transmission lines and nonlinear simulators is the problem of mixed frequency/time [1][3]. This is because distributed elements are usually characterized in the frequency domain, whereas nonlinear components such as drivers and receivers are represented only in the time domain. Several publications can be found in the literature to address this issue [4][17]. Approaches based on conventional lumped segmentation provide a brute force solution to the problem of mixed frequency/time simulation. However, these methods lead to large circuit matrices, rendering the simulation inefcient [2]. Algorithms based on method of characteristics (MoC) [2], [3], [6], [18], [19] provide fast solutions for long low-loss lines. Although they ensure the transmission-line causality [3] (which implies that an excitation signal entering one end of a transmission line segment will appear at the other end only after the time-of-ight delay), they do not guarantee the passivity of resulting macromodels. However, passivity of the macromodel is important since nonpassive but stable models when coupled with arbitrary nonlinear elements can lead to unstable systems [20]. To illustrate the passivity problem associated with the MoC, a lossy transmission line with frequency-dependent parameters [3] is considered. Fig. 1 shows frequency responses obtained from the MoC-based macromodel and that obtained directly

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the proposed macromodel. Section IV presents the realization of the proposed method, while Section V provides the proof of passivity. Sections VI and VII present the computational results and the conclusion, respectively. II. REVIEW OF MRA Consider distributed transmission lines represented by Telegraphers equations [2] as

(1) , , , are p.u.l parameter matrices of the line, , are terminal node voltage and current vectors of the transmission line, respectively. Next, (1) can be expressed in the matrix-exponential form, in the frequency domain as where
versus

Fig. 2. Eigenvalue of the real part of the admittance matrix frequency.

Y (s)

from the transmission line circuit stamp. As seen, they match accurately up to 4.3 GHz. Passivity of the macromodel is veried by computing the eigenvalues of the real part of the admittance matrix as a function of frequency (a necessary condition for passivity is that the real part of the admittance matrix is nonnegative denite for all values of frequency, i.e., all its eigenvalues must be nonnegative for all values of frequency [16]). Fig. 2 shows the frequency spectrum of one of the eigenvalues and it clearly demonstrates the passivity violation, since the eigenvalue is negative at higher frequencies. On the other hand, algorithms based on matrix rational approximations (MRA) [10], [20], [21] guarantee the macromodel passivity. The MRA technique is based on using predetermined coefcients, which are computed as function of the per-unitlength (p.u.l) parameters of the line. Using these coefcients, a transmission line macromodel is derived in the form of ordinary differential equations that can be easily linked to circuit simulators. MRA derives its accuracy and efciency from the closed-form nature of the predetermined coefcients (which avoids computationally expensive and sometimes unreliable numerical tting algorithms associated with MoC, particularly for a large number of coupled lines). However, in the presence of large delay lines (e.g., long lines with small losses), MRA requires high-order approximations (to accurately capture the at delay portion) leading to inefcient transient simulation [18]. This limits its usefulness to short lines (on-chip interconnects). To address the above issues, this paper presents a new algorithm for passive macromodeling of transmission line subnetworks. The proposed algorithm combines the merits of both the MoC and MRA algorithms. It employs an efcient mechanism for delay extraction [22] prior to performing the matrix rational approximation. The new algorithm results in signicantly lower order macromodels for long as well as short lossy-coupled lines, leading to fast transient simulation for both on-chip and off-chip interconnects. The rest of this paper is organized as follows. Section II gives a background on the MRA. Section III describes the basis of

(2) where is the length of the line. The exponential term in (2) does not have a direct representation in the time-domain, which makes it difcult to interface with nonlinear simulators. In order to address this difculty, passive MRA was recently suggested [21], where the exponential matrix in (2) is expressed as (3) where , are polynomial matrices expressed in terms of closed-form Pad rational functions [9], dened as (4)

(5) Using , and noting that for preserving the macromodel passivity [9], the exponential matrix in (2) can be expressed as (6) where , are polynomial matrices, given by (7) The above approximation is formulated analytically in terms of p.u.l. parameters and constants (i.e., and ). These constants are obtained a priori, using methods such as Pad approximation or minimax optimization [20], while ensuring macromodel passivity. Using (7), (2) can be translated into a set of ordinary differential equations, which can be directly linked to

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nonlinear simulators. It is important to note that the accuracy of the above approximation depends on the norm of the term , which is a function of the length . In particular, the smaller the value of , i.e., the shorter the line, the better the approximation. For large delay lines (e.g., long lines with small losses), high-order approximations are required, which lead to inefcient transient simulation. An alternative approach is to use the MoC, in which pure modal delays are extracted. This extraction amounts to decomposing the transient analysis of the lossy transmission line into a lossless line with signal delay and a lumped circuit to account for signal attenuation. An important feature of the MoC is that the pure delay extraction allows the attenuation functions to be approximated with low-order rational function. However, as mentioned in the previous section, the major disadvantage of the MoC is that it does not guarantee passivity. In order to address the above difculties, the following section describes a new algorithm for passive and compact macromodeling of transmission line subnetworks. The proposed algorithm combines the merits of both the MoC and MRA algorithms. The new method employs a mechanism for delay extraction prior to performing MRA, while guaranteeing passivity.

Theorem 1: (Modied Lie Formula-I [MLF-I]): The product (9)

converges asymptotically to as . The associis given by . ated error Prior to proving the above theorem, the following lemma is introduced, which will be useful in the derivation of (9). can be Lemma 1: Given two matrices and , expressed as (10) where is a positive nonzero integer. The proof of the above lemma is given in Appendix I. and Proof of Theorem 1: Let , . as In order to prove Theorem 1, the behavior of is needed. From (10), it can be noted that (11)

III. BASIS OF THE PROPOSED MACROMODEL As discussed in the introduction, in the presence of long delay lines, MRA [(3)(7)], requires high-order approximations in order to accurately capture the at delay portion. Hence, it is of interest to extract the delay from the exponential matrix prior to performing MRA, while preserving the passivity of the macromodel. A. Delay Extraction Examining the terms in (2), it can be noted that the delay part is essentially contributed by the matrix . However, extracting is not a simple task, due to the fact the delay from do not commute, i.e., that the matrices and . Hence, it is desired to nd an approximation of in terms of a product of exponential matrices. The Lie product formula [24] provides a systematic approach to obtain such an and is given by approximation with an error estimation

If

and

are upper bounded by , (11) simplies to

, where

is

(12) Expanding in power series yields

for large where is given by

(13)

(8) (14) . An important point to note where the error here is that the term in (8) does not maintain the symmetry of the original transmission line circuit. In addition, since the error , a relatively large value of would be redecays with quired to achieve a given accuracy, thus, reducing the efciency of the approximation. In order to address the above difculties, a theorem is introduced which maintains the required symmetry as well as provides more accurate delay extraction by modifying the Lie product formula given in (8). Substituting the above results into (12) and noting that and are bounded above by yields (15) The expression in (15) goes to zero as leads to . This result

(16)

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The associated error

in this case is given by (17)

B. Improved Approximation for Long Lines . In the case of long lines, it can be noted that This fact can be utilized to arrive at more accurate relationships based on the modied Lie formula. Lemma 2: (Modied Lie Formula-II [MLF-II]): The product (18) converges asymptotically to is given by ated error as . The associFig. 3. Comparison of error estimates of Lie formula and modied Lie formula-I.

(19) where for . Proof: Following a similar approach as in (9), it can be in this case is given by shown that the error (20) where (21) (22) Next, it can be shown that (23)
Fig. 4. Comparison of error estimates of modied Lie formulas-I, II, and III.

with

given by Similarly, the error in this case is as given in (12), however, is now replaced with , and becomes (27) (25) where is given by

(24) If , then (24) can be written as

Next, a further accurate formula can be obtained by taking the average of the approximations in (9) and (18) and is given by (henceforth referred to as modied Lie formula-III [MLF-III])

(26)

(28) , it can be easily Again, for the case when shown that for low-loss lines . This is demonstrated numerically in Figs. 3 and 4 for a specic set of line parameters.

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C. Frequency-Dependent Parameters In the case of lines with frequency-dependent parameters, the objective is to extract a maximum delay without affecting transmission line passivity conditions. Let (29) such that , are positive denite matrices. The MLF relations developed in previous sections can be easily adjusted to include the information from (29). For example, (18) can be modied to include frequency-dependent parameters as

(30) D. Estimation of the Order of Approximation Using (30), the maximum allowable approximation error for a desired bandwidth can be dened as (31)

Fig. 5.

Order of approximation versus E

for varying bandwidths.

Fig. 6. Macromodel realization of product terms in (30).

where eral, as [4]

denotes the maximum frequency of interest. In genis obtained from the rise/fall time of the input signal

A. Realization of Lossy Sections Pad rational functions in (3) for , can be represented in terms of subsections, described by pole-zero pairs as follows:

rise time

(32)

, the order of approximation can For a given value of be determined using (31). Fig. 5 shows the approximation order for a specic set of line parameters. As expected, for a v/s given maximum allowable error, the order increases with the increase in the bandwidth of approximation. In the next section, application of the modied Lie formulas to passive macromodeling of coupled transmission lines will be described.

(33) for even values of and

IV. REALIZATION OF THE PROPOSED MACROMODEL The products represented by MLF relations developed in the previous section [e.g., (30)] can be viewed as a cascade of transmission line subnetworks. In addition, each of these subnetworks can be viewed as a cascade of lossy and lossless transin (30) can be realized as mission lines. For example, each shown in Fig. 6. Here, the lossy terms are macromodeled using the passive MRA [20]. The resulting macromodels are of significant lower orders (since a signicant delay portion is already extracted from these terms). They are later combined with the lossless sections using the MoC approach, along with an algorithm to decouple the multiconductor transmission line equations. The following sections describe the realization of these lossy and lossless terms.

(34) for odd values of . Here, is dened as , represents the unity matrix, and ; are predetermined coefcients [10]. The symbol represents the complex conjugate operation. Time domain realization of these subsections can be found in [10].

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B. Realization of Lossless Sections The terminal voltages and currents of the n-port lossless section are related by

and the vectors which are funcwhere the delay are dened as tions of (49) where superscript denotes the transpose. The line voltages and currents can be determined in terms of the and currents using (36), where modal voltages and can be computed as follows [2]: (50) (51) where is a matrix of the right eigenvectors of and is , i.e., a diagonal matrix of the eigenvalues of . Matrix consists of the right eigenvectors of the product , (i.e. . The normal, given izing diagonal matrix has the diagonal elements by (52)

(35) and . Next, (35) is where expressed in terms of propagating modal voltages and currents as [2] (36) The transformation matrices and they simultaneously diagonalize both can be found such that and as follows: (37) (38) where and are diagonal matrices of the form diag and diag . Using (36)(38), (1) can be expressed for lossless lines, in terms of modal parameters as

(39) It is to be noted that (39) represents a set of decoupled modal equations (since and are diagonal matrices). This implies that the solutions for modal voltages and currents have a general form similar to that of the single line case. Hence, the modal and the characteristic impedance propagation constant of the th mode can be obtained as (40)

with being the elements of the matrix stituting (50) and (51) into (37) and (38) results in

. Sub-

(53) (54) Note that since the equations in (45)(48) are represented in the time-domain, they can be solved simultaneously with the time-domain modied nodal analysis (MNA) equations describing the rest of the circuit. V. PASSIVITY OF THE PROPOSED MACROMODEL

The actual voltages and currents can be obtained by using the solution of the modal voltages and currents along with (36). Using (40), the solution to (39) can be written in the form (41) (42) (43) (44) , , , and represent the near where and far end modal voltages and currents, respectively; diag and diag . Using (41)(44), the solution to (39) can be written in the time domain as (45) (46) (47) (48)

Passivity implies that a network cannot generate more energy than it absorbs, and no passive termination of the network will cause the system to be unstable [25][27]. Passivity is an important property to satisfy because stable, but nonpassive, macromodels can produce unstable networks when connected to other stable, even passive loads [16]. In this section, we present a proof that demonstrates the passivity of the proposed macromodel. The following are necessary and sufcient conditions for to be passive [26]. linear -port system admittance matrix 1) Each element of is analytic in . for all , where is the complex conju2) gate operator. is a positive-real (PR) matrix. This means that the 3) product for all possible values and for any arbitrary matrix . of satisfying To show that the realization of the macromodel given by (30) is passive, we need to prove the passivity of both the lossy sections, realized by (33) and (34), and the lossless sections realized by (35)(54).

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Lossy Sections: It is to be noted that in (33) and (34), the matrix is dened in terms of the p.u.l. parameters and the delayless (lossy) portion of the transmission line stamp as , where

(55) In [9] and [21], it was shown that the passivity of the MRA realization given by (33) and (34) is guaranteed if and are positivereal (PR) rational function matrices. Several techniques for PR and can be found in [10] and [28]. approximations of Lossless Sections: To prove the passivity of the lossless reof the alization given by (35)(54), the admittance matrix multiport lossless section is written in the form (56) , , and are the near and far end currents and where , voltages, respectively. Using (36), (56) can be rewritten in the form (57) or (58) However, the modal currents and voltages are related through the solution of (39) as (59) where is a block diagonal matrix of the form diag , with being the input admittance matrix of the th lossless line with p.u.l. parameters and , given by the decoupled set of equations (53) and (54), respectively. In (59), the matrix represents a real permutation matrix. Using (58) and (59), we can write (60) Rearranging (60) yields VI. COMPUTATIONAL RESULTS Four examples are presented in this section to demonstrate the validity and efciency of the proposed model (DEPACT). The rst example deals with a long cable line while the second example represents a PCB interconnect with different lengths. Both examples were proposed as benchmark test problems in [29]. The third example involves coupled interconnect networks with nonlinear terminations. The fourth example illustrates the impact of the bandwidth on the order of approximation. The results given by the proposed method are compared with the MRA and SPICE analysis. Within the context of this section, SPICE analysis refers to using the conventional lumped segmentation model [2] to obtain the networks time-domain response. Comparison of the CPU time was done using SUN UltraSPARC-III machine. Example 1: Cable Line: In this example, a long 10 m cable (problem referred to as Line-4 in [29]) is considered. The input voltage is a unit step response with rise time of 0.1 ns. Fig. 7 shows the transient response at the far end of the transmission line using MRA [21] and the proposed method. For their respective orders, both macromodels produced similar responses, however, the proposed method is over 100 times faster when compared to the MRA macromodel (Table I). Example 2: PCB Interconnect: The second example deals with a PCB interconnect network referred to as Line-6 in [29]. This network is analyzed for different lengths (5, 20, and 40 cm). The input voltage is a unit step response with rise time of 0.035 ns. Figs. 8 and 9 show the transient response from both the MRA and the proposed method for line length
Fig. 7. Time-domain response (Example 1).

Passivity conditions (1) and (2) are satised since diag is analytic in and is a real matrix. In is a positive-real matrix since is positiveaddition, real. Using the fact that is a real matrix, it follows from (61) that is positive-real [26], thus, satisfying the third condition of passivity.

(61) where the matrix is dened as (62)

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TABLE I CPU COMPARISON (EXAMPLE 1)

TABLE II CPU COMPARISON (EXAMPLE 2)

Fig. 10. 3).

Coupled interconnect system with nonlinear terminations (Example

of 40 cm, for active and victim lines, respectively. Table II gives the comparison of CPU expense of the proposed method, MRA and conventional lumped model [2]. As seen from the table, the proposed method provides 1-to-2 orders of magnitude speed-ups for low-loss transmission line networks compared to MRA and 2-to-3 orders of magnitude speed-ups compared to conventional lumped segmentation approaches, while ensuring the passivity of the macromodel. Example 3: Coupled Lines: Three coupled interconnect networks with nonlinear inverters are shown in Fig. 10. The line parameters are as follows: cm nH/cm pF/cm

Fig. 8. Time-domain response (Example 2). (a) Active line near end. (b) Active line far end.

cm for MTL subnetwork #1 and cm nH/cm pF/cm

(63)

cm

(64)

Fig. 9.

Time-domain response (Example 2). Victim line far end.

for MTL subnetworks #2 and #3. The input voltage is a unit step response with rise time of 0.1 ns. Fig. 11 shows the transient responses of the far-end voltages (labeled active and victim line) obtained using SPICE analysis and the proposed method. The transient simulation using

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TABLE III ORDER OF REALIZATION VERSUS RISE TIME (EXAMPLE 4)

Fig. 13. Fig. 11. Time-domain response (Example 3). (a) Active line far end. (b) Victim line far end.

Time-domain response: Active line; rise time

= 0.5 ns.

Fig. 12. Coupled interconnect system (Example 4).

Fig. 14.

Time-domain response: Victim line; rise time

= 0.5 ns.

the proposed macromodel required 0.75 s of CPU time, while the conventional lumped model required 23.4 s. Example 4: Approximation Order versus Bandwidth: This example illustrates the impact of the frequency bandwidth on the order of the realization. The example (Fig. 12) consists of 10-cm-coupled lines with the following parameters cm nH/cm m pF/cm (65) Several values for the rise time of the unit step input voltage source were considered. For a maximum allowable error of 0.1%, the order of the realization was determined using the method described in Section III-D. Table III shows the order of the realization used by DEPACT for different rise times. As expected, the order increases as the rise time decreases. For verication, samples of the corresponding time-domain response are shown in Figs. 1316.
Fig. 15. Time-domain response: Active line; rise time

= 0.1 ns.

VII. CONCLUSION This paper presented a new algorithm for passive and compact macromodeling of transmission line subnetworks. The proposed algorithm combines the merits of both the MoC and MRA algorithms. It employs an efcient mechanism for delay extraction prior to performing the matrix rational approximation. The new algorithm results in signicantly lower order macromodels for long as well as short lossy-coupled lines, leading to fast transient simulation for both on-chip and off-chip interconnects.

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Fig. 16.

Time-domain response: Victim line; rise time

= 0.02 ns.

Validity and efciency of the proposed algorithm was demonstrated using several benchmark examples.

APPENDIX I PROOF OF LEMMA 1 Given two matrices and , starting with the identity (66) we can write (67) Rearranging (67) yields (68) from which we can prove that (69) After some mathematical manipulation, we get the following result: (70)

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dU dt = pU

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[28] A. Dounavis, Passive time-domain macromodels of high speed interconnect networks, Ph.D. dissertation, Carleton Univ., Ottawa, ON, Canada, 2003. [29] A. Ruehli, A. C. Cangellaris, and H.-M. Huang, Three test problems for the comparison of lossy transmission line algorithms, in Proc. EPEP, Oct. 2002, pp. 347350.

Natalie M. Nakhla (S04) was born in Ottawa, ON, Canada, in September 1980. She received the B. Eng. degree in telecommunications engineering from Carleton University, Ottawa, ON, Canada, in 2003 where she is currently pursuing her graduate studies. Her research interests include computer-aided design of VLSI circuits, simulation and modeling of high-speed interconnects, packaging characterization and numerical techniques. Ms. Nakhla is the recipient of the National Science and Engineering Research Council Postgraduate Award (20032005). She also received the Carleton University Senate Medal for outstanding academic achievement at the undergraduate level.

Ramachandra Achar (S95M00SM04) received the B.Eng. degree in electronics engineering from Bangalore University, India, in 1990, the M.Eng. degree in microelectronics from the Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani, India, in 1992, and the Ph.D. degree from Carleton University, Ottawa, ON, Canada, in 1998. He is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Electronics, Carleton University. He spent the summer of 1995 working on high-speed interconnect analysis at the T. J. Watson Research Center, IBM, Yorktown Heights, NY. He was a graduate trainee at the Central Electronics Engineering Research Institute, Pilani, India, during 1992 and was also previously employed at Larsen and Toubro Engineers Ltd., Mysore, India, and at the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, India as a Research and Development Engineer. From 1998 to 2000, he served as a Research Engineer in the CAE Group, Carleton University. His research interests include modeling and simulation of high-speed interconnects, model-order reduction, numerical algorithms, and development of computer-aided design tools for high-frequency circuit analysis. Dr. Achar received the University Medal from Carleton University for his doctoral work on high-speed VLSI interconnect analysis. He also received several prestigious awards, including the NSERC (Natural Science and Engineering Research Council) Doctoral Award (2000), the Strategic Microelectronics Corporation (SMC) Award (1997), the Canadian Microelectronics Corporation (CMC) Award (1996), and the Best Student Paper Award in the 1998 Micronet (a Canadian Network of Centers of Excellence on Microelectronics) Annual Workshop. Dr. Achar serves on the Technical Program Committee of several leading IEEE conferences and is a consultant for several leading industries focussed on high-frequency circuits, systems, and tools.

Anestis Dounavis (S99M04) received the B. Eng. degree in electrical engineering from McGill University, Montreal, QC, Canada, in 1995 and the M. Eng. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from Carleton University, Ottawa, ON, Canada, in 2000 and 2004, respectively. He currently serves as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer and Electrical Engineering, University of Western Ontario, London, ON, Canada. His research interests are in electronic design automation, simulation of high-speed networks, signal integrity, and numerical algorithms. Dr. Dounavis was the recipient of the Ottawa Center for Research and Innovation (OCRI) Futures AwardStudent Researcher of the Year in 2004, and the INTEL Best Student Paper Award at the Electrical Performance of Electronic Packaging Conference in 2003. He also received the Carleton University Medal for outstanding graduate work at the master and Ph.D. levels in 2000 and 2004, respectively.

Michel S. Nakhla (S73M75SM88F98) received the M.A.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from the University of Waterloo, ON, Canada, in 1973 and 1975, respectively. He is Chancellors Professor of Electrical Engineering at Carleton University. From 1976 to 1988, he was with Bell-Northern Research, Ottawa, ON, Canada, as the Senior Manager of the Computer-Aided Engineering Group. In 1988, he joined Carleton University, Ottawa, ON, Canada, as a Professor and the Holder of the Computer-Aided Engineering Senior Industrial Chair established by Bell-Northern Research and the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada. He is the founder of the high-speed CAD Research Group, Carleton University. He serves as Technical Consultant for several industrial organizations and is the Principal Investigator for several major sponsored research projects. His research interests include CAD of VLSI and microwave circuits, modeling and simulation of high-speed interconnects, nonlinear circuits, multidisciplinary optimization, thermal and electromagnetic emission analysis, MEMS, and neural networks. Dr. Nakhla was Associate Editor of the IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON CIRCUITS AND SYSTEMSPART I: FUNDAMENTAL THEORY AND APPLICATIONS and Guest Editor for the IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON COMPONENTS, PACKAGING, AND MANUFACTURING TECHNOLOGYPART B: ADVANCED PACKAGING, and the IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON CIRCUITS AND SYSTEMS II: ANALOG AND DIGITAL SIGNAL PROCESSING.