A review of the skin effect as applied to thin film interconnections

As the rise time of digital pulses is reduced to the subnanosecond range, the skin effect becomes an important issue in high-speed digital systems. The various approaches (theoretical and experimental) which have been taken to study the skin effect are surveyed. Various methods that accommodate the skin effect phenomenon into conductor design rules for high-speed digital systems are examined and compared. The resulting impact of these accommodations on high performance ULSI/VLSI multichip packages is addressed.>