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。现代CMOS技术供电电压的迅速降低，很大程度上是由于对电子器件特别是便携式电子器件功耗的严格要求。随着现代CMOS技术的特征尺寸不断大幅缩小，最先进的电子系统的供电电压的安全边际越来越紧。电子系统中由于长互连、过孔、键合线和多芯片系统中长片间互连所产生的电感的存在，以及由于逻辑状态的快速切换所引起的瞬态电流变化，会产生较大的电源电压波动，称为电压瞬变或功率噪声。电源电压瞬变可能导致电源电压与其标称值产生较大偏差，在60纳米技术中导致速度下降高达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，负偏置温度不稳定性加速，甚至器件的永久性损坏。电源电压瞬变发生在电路的某一部分突然开启或关闭时，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，这种技术越来越广泛地应用于大量复杂电子系统，这些系统被称为电源门控，目的是为了节省电力。芯片上电源电压瞬态的实时测量对微处理器和微电子系统的运行至关重要。该项目将探索新的架构、电路技术和CMOS硅实现芯片上电源电压瞬态的实时测量，并限制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.