Signal Integrity and Behavioral Models of Digital Devices

The behavioral modeling of digital integrated circuits is becoming an important resource for the simulations of large and critical digital circuits. In this paper, we address the behavioral modeling of CMOS integrated circuit on the basis of the Input/output Buffer Information Specification (IBIS). The aim of this work is to provide guidelines to build executable models from IBIS data, which is not provided by the IBIS specification itself. Such an ability is of paramount importance for the validation of IBIS data sets through the comparison of measured transient responses of digital devices and the corresponding responses obtained by IBIS models. Besides discussing basic elements of IBIS models and their critical points, we propose an effective IBIS model, which offers improved accuracy and efficiency, and can be effectively exploited for experimental validations.