Study of non-invasive real-time on-chip di/dt events

现代微芯片的性能受到微芯片电源电压的严重影响。对电子设备，特别是便携式电子设备的功耗提出了严格的要求，这在很大程度上推动了现代CMOS技术电源电压的迅速降低。随着现代CMOS技术的特征尺寸不断缩小，最先进的电子系统的电源电压安全裕度变得越来越严格。电子系统中电感的存在源于多芯片系统中的长互连、通孔、键合线和长片间互连，以及由于逻辑状态的快速切换而引起的瞬时电流变化，从而引起被称为电压瞬变或电源噪声的大的电源电压波动。电源电压瞬变会导致电源电压偏离其标称值，导致60 nm技术中速度下降高达9%、电路故障、可靠性问题，如氧化物寿命缩短、热载流子注入加剧、加速负偏置温度不稳定性，甚至器件的永久性损坏。电源电压瞬变发生在电路的一部分突然接通或关断时，随着微处理器复杂性的不断增加和电源管理技术的广泛应用，电源电压瞬变变得越来越广泛，电源管理技术为节省电能而专门称为电源门控的复杂电子系统的很大一部分通电/关断。片上电源电压瞬变的实时测量对微处理器和微电子系统的运行至关重要。本项目将探索在芯片上实时测量电源电压瞬变的新架构、电路技术和CMOS硅实现，其约束是探测传感器不会注入额外的噪声，也不会影响开关噪声的传播和信号的完整性。

The performance of modern microchips is critically affected by the supply voltages of the microchips. The rapid reduction of the supply voltage of modern CMOS technologies is largely fueled by the stringent requirements on the power consumption of electronic devices especially portable electronic devices. As the feature size of modern CMOS technologies continuously shrinks aggressively, the safe margin of the supply voltage of state-of-the-art electronic systems becomes increasingly tightened. The existence of inductances in electronic systems arising from long interconnects, vias, bond wires, and long inter-chip interconnects in multichip systems and transient current changes caused by the rapid switching of logic states give rise to large supply voltage fluctuations known as voltage transients or power noise. Supply voltage transients can result in a large deviation of the supply voltage from its nominal value, causing speed degradation as much as 9% in a 60 nm technology, the malfunction of circuits, reliability issues such as reduced oxide lifetime, aggravated hot carrier injection, and accelerated negative bias temperature instability, or even the permanent damage of devices. Supply voltage transients occur when one part of the circuit experiences a sudden switch-on or switch-off, which becomes increasingly wide-spread with the continuous increase in the complexity of microprocessors and the wide deployment of power management techniques that switch on/off a large portion of complex electronic systems purposely known as power-gating in order to save power. On-chip real-time measurement of supply voltage transients is critical to the operation of microprocessors and microelectronic systems. This project will explore new architectures, circuit techniques, and CMOS silicon implementation of on-chip real-time measurement of supply voltage transients with the constraint that probing sensors will not inject additional noise, nor will they affect the propagation of switching noise and the integrity of signals.