Product on-chip process compensation for low power and yield enhancement

Abstract

This paper aims at introducing a reliable on-chip process compensation flow for industrial integrated systems. Among the integrated process compensation techniques, the main one aims at reducing the supply voltage of fast circuits in order to reduce their power consumption while maintaining the specified operating frequency. The proposed design flow includes efficient methodologies to gather/sort on-chip process data but also post-silicon tuning strategies and validation methods at both design and test steps. Concrete results are introduced in this paper to demonstrate the added value of such a methodology. More precisely, it is shown that its application leads to an overall energy reduction ranging from 10% to 20% on fast chips. © 2010 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.