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

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

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.