Almost at the end of the second millennium we experience what has been called the information revolution. This was made possible because Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI) technology gave man, for the first time, a huge computing and reasoning power. It all started in 1947 when John Bardeen, Walter Brattain and William Shockely invented the bipolar transistor. A decade later Jack Kilby of Texas Instruments achieved a major breakthrough when he created the first Integrated Circuit (IC), which was then improved by Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore of Fairchild Semiconductor with the development of the planar transistor. Since this latter invention the microelectronic industry has been growing exponentially, in close agreement with the doubling of component (and functional) density every 1.5 years and of the maximum circuit speed every 2 years, as Gordon Moore early noted [1]. Albeit integrated circuit miniaturization is always associated with some sort of new unwanted phenomena, these have always been successfully solved in the past and is expected to happen in the future. This is what our work is about - The design of CAD tools capable of handling the problems that modern integrated circuits face and will face.
Everyday more and more applications for integrated circuits are
discovered, some of them for use in trivial objects of our quotidian
lives, such as automobiles, telephones, or a simple toaster. The objective is
to replace the complexity (and cost) of the electronics in such systems by
an integrated circuit, aiming the system on chip as ultimate
target. But the huge density of modern integrated circuits
brings about several new problems in both manufacture and design areas. From
these the power dissipation and in-chip interconnections are considered to be
of paramount relevance [2][3]. The power
dissipation (which below a density
level of 
transistors/cm
was never of crucial importance) is expected
to be the main limitation of high performance integrated circuits by the
year 2012 [2][4]. Besides, power consumption is also of considerable
importance in the very fast growing market of the portable equipment, where
despite some improvements in batteries, there is still a lack of good power
supplies. In the near future interconnections are expected to be
responsible for a large part of the chip area and to constitute a severe
limitation in maximum circuit's speed [3][5].
Due to the extremely high budgets required for fabrication facilities and
equipment, the development strategies based on experimental work are
becoming impracticable, forcing the semiconductor industry to rely, to
a large extend, on Computer-Aided Design (CAD) methodologies.
In addition to the well-established and extensively
used Electronic CAD (ECAD), Technology CAD (TCAD) tools are
indispensable in the development of future generations of fabrication
processes [6]. ECAD is
concerned with the design of an integrated
circuit in terms of behavioral descriptions, netlists, schematics and layout. It
can model the integrated circuit as a whole or as a set of functional blocks. TCAD
tools have been developed to simulate the several fabrication process steps and
to characterize the resultant devices
