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Evaluation of using active circuitry for substrate noise suppression

Published: 11 March 2007 Publication History

Abstract

The performance of system-on-chips can be severely degraded if noisy circuits interfere with sensitive circuits through the common silicon substrate. Many methods have been proposed to suppress such substrate noise, ranging from designing circuits that generateless noise to using guard bands to prevent noise from reaching the sensitive parts. In this paper we have investigated a proposed method for substrate noise suppression using active circuitry, and compared it with two passive methods; resistive grounding and capacitive decoupling. Published results indicate that active noise suppression outperforms passive noise suppression. However, these results are based on simulations using over simplified substrate models, like single node or resistor T-models. In this paper we confirm these previous results, but we also show that when using a more realistic substrate model these advantages disappear! We claim that there is no noticeable difference between active noise suppression and DC grounding; these two methods are comparable and better than capacitive decoupling. The substrate resistivity in system-on-chip solutions typically result in large substrate resistances that decrease the efficiency of active decoupling compared to simple DC grounding.

References

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T. Tsukada, Y. Hashimoto, K. Sakata, H. Okada, and K. Ishibashi, "An on-chip active decoupling circuit to supress crosstalk in deep-submicron CMOS mixed-signal SoCs, - IEEE Journal of Solid State Circuits, vol. 40, no. 1, pp. 67--79, Jan. 2005.
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K. Makie-Fukuda, S. Maeda, T. Tsukada, and T. Matsuura, "Substrate noise reduction using active guard band filters in mixed-signal integrated circuits," in Symposium on VLSI Circuits. Digest of Technical Papers, 1995, pp. 33--34.
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S. Kristiansson, F. Ingvarson, S. P. Kagganti, N. Simic, M. Zgrda, and K. O. Jeppson, "A surface potential model for predicting substrate noise coupling in integrated circuits," IEEE Journal of Solid State Circuits, vol. 40, no. 9, pp. 1797--1803, Sept. 2005.
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    cover image ACM Conferences
    GLSVLSI '07: Proceedings of the 17th ACM Great Lakes symposium on VLSI
    March 2007
    626 pages
    ISBN:9781595936059
    DOI:10.1145/1228784
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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    Published: 11 March 2007

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    Author Tags

    1. active noise decoupling
    2. substrate coupling
    3. substrate modeling

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    March 11 - 13, 2007
    Stresa-Lago Maggiore, Italy

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