Circuit techniques for suppression and measurement of on-chip inductive supply noise

Abstract

Increasing power consumption and clock frequency have significantly exacerbated the Ldi/dt drop, which has emerged as the dominant fraction of the overall power supply drop in high performance designs. We present the design and validation of a high-voltage, charge-pump based active decoupling circuit for the suppression of on-chip inductive power-supply noise. We also propose a low-power, high-resolution, digital on-chip oscilloscope technique, based on repetitive sampling, for measurement of high-frequency supply noise. The proposed circuits were implemented and fabricated in a 0.13mum CMOS process. Measurement results on the prototype demonstrate 48% and 53% reduction in power supply noise for rapidly switching current-loads and during resonance, respectively. On-chip supply noise is measured using the proposed on-chip oscilloscope and the noise waveforms are compared with those obtained from a traditional supply noise monitor and direct on-chip probing using probe pads.