IEEE Computer Society Annual Symposium on VLSI (ISVLSI '07) Enhancing the Tolerance to Power-Supply Instability in Digital Circuits Porto Alegre, Brazil March 09-March 11 ISBN: 0-7695-2896-1
As IC technology scales down, power supply instability may dramatically contribute to signal integrity loss. In this paper, we propose a new methodology to enhance circuit tolerance to powersupply voltage (VDD) local variations, without degrading its performance. The underlying idea is to add additional tolerance to the edge trigger of the clock signal driving specific memory cells. The clock duty-cycle (CDC) is thus dynamically modulated according to VDD. Two architectures are presented, and one of them is shown to be effective. The key module is a Clock Stretching Logic (CSL) block, used to increase CDC according to VDD-VSS variations. Moreover, when clock frequency reduction is inevitable, circuit tolerance when disturbances start to occur is enhanced, allowing the clock generator to react and reduce its frequency. Experimental results based on SPICE simulations for simple combinational, pipeline and finite-state machine (FSM) circuits are used to demonstrate the usefulness of the proposed methodology.
Citation:
J. Semiao, J. Freijedo, J.J. Rodr?guez Andina, F. Vargas, M. B. Santos, I. C. Teixeira, J. P. Teixeira, "Enhancing the Tolerance to Power-Supply Instability in Digital Circuits," isvlsi, pp.207-212, IEEE Computer Society Annual Symposium on VLSI (ISVLSI '07), 2007 Usage of this product signifies your acceptance of the Terms of Use. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||