Historically, Back End of Line (BEOL) or interconnect resistance and capacitance have been viewed as parasitic components. They have now become key parameters with significant impact on circuit performance and signal integrity. This paper examines the types of BEOL variations and their impact on RC extraction. The importance of modeling systematic effects in RC extraction is discussed. The need for minimizing the computational error in RC extraction before incorporating random process variations is emphasized.

Scalable video compression requires the creation of an encoded bit stream that may be decoded in part if channel bandwidth drops, decoder resources are limited, or a smaller image than the source is desired. A separable spatiotemporal subband decomposition is combined with vector and lattice quantizers modified so that the individual subbands may be decoded scalably. This results in finer bandwidth control and more flexibility than simply discarding entire subbands.>