Rahul Kundu Carnegie Mellon University

Functional Analysis of Crosstalk Switch Failures in Domino Logic Circuits

Domino circuits are being increasingly used in high-performance systems because of their high speed, low transistor count and hazard-free operation. However, with technology scaling, domino circuits are increasingly susceptible to switching failures due to erroneous discharge caused by capacitive coupling, charge-sharing, leakage, etc.

In this talk, we analyze switch failures in domino circuits due to capacitive coupling. We describe a technique to determine the relative alignment of multiple aggressors for maximum coupling discharge. However, such an idealistic alignment of the aggressors may not be feasible due to global timing and logic constraints of the full domino circuit. We next show how a more detailed analysis can be performed to identify the crosstalk failure sites using global constraints. It is observed that although the analysis using global constraints is computationally expensive, it eliminates a large fraction of the failures identified using a traditional local analysis (without timing and logic constraints).

Bio
Rahul Kundu received his B-Tech in ECE from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur in 1996. He worked in computer systems design in HCL-Hewlett Packard, India from 1996-1997 and received his MS from University of California, Santa Cruz in June 1999. Since June 1999, he is working for his Ph.D. at Carnegie Mellon with Prof. Shawn Blanton as advisor.