Worst-case IR-drop monitoring with 1GHz sampling rate

Abstract

IR-drop monitoring has been an effective means to assess the power integrity in real silicon. Existing methods, however, fail to achieve a high accuracy and a high sampling rate simultaneously. In this paper, we present a novel method to resolve this dilemma. First of all, we focus on the measurement of the worst-case IR-drop, instead of the entire sampled VDD waveform. This strategy can make a high sampling rate easily viable. Secondly, we perform periodic calibration to account for not only the process variation but also the temperature change. Post-layout simulation indicates that this method can support 1 GHz sample rate while keeping the measurement error less than 4.81 mV at the same time. © 2013 IEEE.