PRIMA: passive reduced-order interconnect macromodeling algorithm

This paper describes PRIMA, an algorithm for generating provably passive reduced order N-port models for RLC interconnect circuits. It is demonstrated that, in addition to requiring macromodel stability, macromodel passivity is needed to guarantee the overall circuit stability once the active and passive driver/load models are connected. PRIMA extends the block Arnoldi technique to include guaranteed passivity. Moreover, it is empirically observed that the accuracy is superior to existing block Arnoldi methods. While the same passivity extension is not possible for MPVL, we observed comparable accuracy in the frequency domain for all examples considered. Additionally a path tracing algorithm is used to calculate the reduced order macromodel with the utmost efficiency for generalized RLC interconnects.