On-Die Power Supply Noise Measurement Techniques

This paper presents techniques for characterizing wide-band on-chip power supply noise using only two on-chip low-throughput samplers. The properties of supply noise and their associated measurement techniques are reviewed to show how this can be achieved. An initial design of the samplers uses high-resolution VCO-based analog-to-digital converters, and experimental results from a test-chip verify the efficacy of the measurement techniques. To enable simple sampler designs to be used even in aggressively scaled process technologies, measurement systems based on dithered low-resolution samplers are also developed and experimentally characterized.