PVT Co-Monitoring Methodology for Integrated Circuits

碩士 === 國立清華大學 === 電機工程學系 === 100 === The ring oscillator has long been used as a process monitor inside an IC. However, its clock period is jointly affected by the PVT (Process, Voltage, and Temperature) conditions. In this work, we present a low-cost methodology that can make a ring oscillator an e...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Tseng, Tzu-Yen, 曾梓晏
Other Authors: Huang, Shi-Yu
Format: Others
Language:en_US
Published: 2011
Online Access:http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/16602708216974007930
Description
Summary:碩士 === 國立清華大學 === 電機工程學系 === 100 === The ring oscillator has long been used as a process monitor inside an IC. However, its clock period is jointly affected by the PVT (Process, Voltage, and Temperature) conditions. In this work, we present a low-cost methodology that can make a ring oscillator an even more versatile monitor – for not only the process status, but also the temperature and the IR-drop traces in normal operation. To achieve this goal, our methodology heavily relies on the support of the software to perform two tasks - (1) PVT-aware clock period modeling of a given ring oscillator, and (2) PVT analysis that derives the temperature trace and the IR-drop trace inside an IC under monitoring considering process variation.