One of the main challenges in developing an effective crosstalk noise management strategy is to develop a crosstalk noise estimate which is both accurate and leads to a tractable optimization problem that can be used to optimally redistribute uncommitted routing resources to resolve crosstalk noise violations. Devgan's [4] estimate comes very close to meeting these objectives, however, it is extremely pessimistic for nets with long couplings or aggressor nets with short rise times. The increased complexity of more sophisticated estimates, such as that proposed by Vittal et. al. [13] lead to a crosstalk management problem that is very hard to solve. In this paper we develop two estimates, similar in form to Devgan's estimate, that are based on local approximations of Vittal's estimate. Our estimates are substantially more accurate than Devgan's estimate while still allowing us to formulate the crosstalk management problem in a form that can be solved efficiently.

In thii paper we propose a new, and effective, approach to cross-talk noise avoidance routing.In our new approach we attack the cross-talk noise problem immediately following topological routing, which is the point in the routing process that gives the best trade off between the ability to detect cross-talk noise problems and the ability to correct the problems.We formulate the heart of this new approach as a convex, nonlinear, mathematical programming problem which determines an optimal set of wire spacings under cross-talk noise constraints.This new mathematical programming formulation is based on a detailed knowledge of the underlying cross-talk noise mechanisms and accounts for coupling capacitance, interconnect resistance, and aggressor net signal rise time on nets with arbitrarily complex tree topologies.Finally, by slightly restricting this programming problem we formulate it as a linearly constrained, convex, nonlinesr, mathematical program which can be quickly and efficiently solved using sequential quadratic programming.