Gokce Keskin Carneige Mellon University

Power Supply Noise Reduction Using Active Resistors

With the reduction of supply voltages in today's integrated circuits, maintaining the power supply voltage integrity within the required range of operation has become a critical design problem. Furthermore, if clock gating techniques are used to reduce the overall power consumption, a large portion of the circuits are turned on or off simultaneously. This introduces substantial transient switching noise, sometimes called simultaneous switching noise, on the power grid. The traditional solution for this problem is to include both on- and off-chip decoupling capacitors to reduce transient peaks. However, there is a point of diminishing returns for adding more on-chip capacitance in terms of area and leakage power in modern technologies. We propose using active resistors for damping the typically underdamped power grid distribution network to reduce both the amplitude and the duration of transient oscillations in the power and ground rails. Initial simulation results in 130nm CMOS technology demonstrate more than a 40% reduction in oscillation amplitude and a significant reduction of the oscillation settling time over a conventional design with the same amount of decoupling.

Bio:

Gokce Keskin got his B.S. degree in Electrical & Electronics Engineering in 2003 from Bilkent University, Ankara, Turkey. He joined the ECE Department at Carnegie Mellon University the same year and he is currently an M.S. student under the guidance of Professor Larry Pileggi. His work is focused on analog circuit design