In high-speed digital circuits, in order to utilize the space of printed circuit boards efficiently, the signal via is a heavily used interconnection structure to communicate different signal layers. However, the interconnection discontinuities will result in the degradation of the signal integrity and become a crucial issue for IC designers. To analyze the problems accurately and fast using the hybrid physical equivalent model which combining the transmission line model, slot model, via model, and decoupling capacitor model, etc. Based on the method, we can get a good result of simulation and compute faster than Ansoft HFSS. In addition, by the hybrid physical model method, we simulate and discuss several interesting issues such as resonance in power/ground planes, and the effect of the simultaneous switching noise, we also improve the bad effect of the printed circuit boards existing vias by some ways.

The main objective of this thesis is to develop models for the power distribution network of high performance gigascale chips. The two main concerns in distributing power in a chip are voltage drop and electromigration-induced reliability failures. The voltage drop on the power distribution network is due to IR-drop and simultaneous switching noise. IR-drop is the voltage drop due to current passing through the resistances of the power distribution network. Simultaneous switching noise is due to varying current passing through the inductances of the power distribution network. Compact physical models are derived for the IR-drop and electromigration for different types of packages. These chip-package co-design models enable designers in the early stages of the design to estimate the on-chip interconnect resources, and also to choose type and size of the package required for power distribution. Modeling of the simultaneous switching noise requires the simulation of a large circuit with thousands of inductances. The main obstacle challenging the simulation of a simultaneous switching noise circuit model is the computing resources required to solve the dense inductance matrix. In this work, a new relative inductance matrix is introduced to solve massively coupled RLC interconnects. It is proven that the analysis using this method is accurate for a wide frequency range and all configurations. Using the new inductance matrix makes the circuit simulations significantly faster without losing accuracy.

<p>Microelectronics is heading towards larger and larger systems implemented on a single chip. In wireless communication equipment, e.g., cellular phones, handheld computers etc., both analog and digital circuits are required. If several integrated circuits (ICs) are used in a system, a large amount of the power is consumed by the communication between the ICs. Furthermore, the communication between ICs is slow compared with on-chip communication. Therefore, it is favorable to integrate the whole system on a single chip, which is the objective in the system-on-chip (SoC) approach.</p><p>In a mixed-signal SoC, analog and digital circuits share the same chip. When digital circuits are switching, they produce noise that is spread through the silicon substrate to other circuits. This noise is known as substrate noise. The performance of sensitive analog circuits is degraded by the substrate noise in terms of, e.g., lower signal-to-noise ratio and lower spurious-free dynamic range. Another problem is the design of the clock distribution net, which is challenging in terms of obtaining low power consumption, sharp clock edges, and low simultaneous switching noise.</p><p>In this thesis, a noise reduction strategy that focus on reducing the amount of noise produced in digital clock buffers, is presented. The strategy is to use a clock with long rise and fall times. It is also used to relax the constraints on the clock distribution net, which also reduce the design effort. Measurements on a test chip show that the strategy can be implemented in an IC with low cost in terms of speed and power consumption. Comparisons between substrate coupling in silicon-on-insulator (SOI) and conventional bulk technology are made using simple models. The objective here is to get an understanding of how the substrate coupling differs in SOI from the bulk technology. The results show that the SOI has less substrate coupling when no guard band is used, up to a certain frequency that is highly dependent of the chip structure. When a guard band is introduced in one of the analyzed test structures, the bulk resulted in much higher attenuation compared with SOI. An on-chip measurement circuit aiming at measuring simultaneous switching noise has also been designed in a 0.13 µ SOI process.</p> / Report code: LiU-Tek-Lic-2005:33.

In many consumer products, e.g., cellular phones and handheld computers, both digital and analog circuits are required. Nowadays, it is possible to implement a large subsystem or even a complete system, that earlier required several chips, on a single chip. A system on chip (SoC) has generally the advantages of lower power consumption and a smaller fabrication cost compared with multi-chip solutions. The switching of digital circuits generates noise that is injected into the silicon substrate. This noise is known as substrate noise and is spread through the substrate to other circuits. The substrate noise received in an analog circuit degrades the performance of the circuit. This is a major design issue in mixed-signal ICs where analog and digital circuits share the same substrate. Two new noise reduction methods are proposed in this thesis work. The first focuses n reducing the switching noise generated in digital clock buffers. The strategy is to use a clock with long rise and fall times in conjunction with a special D flip-flop. It relaxes the constraints on the clock distribution net, which also reduce the design effort. Measurements on a test chip implemented in a 0.35 μm CMOS technology show that the method can be implemented in an IC with low cost in terms of speed and power consumption. A noise reduction up to 50% is obtained by using the method. The measured power consumption of the digital circuit, excluding the clock buffer, increased 14% when the rise and fall times of the clock were increased from 0.5 ns to 10 ns. The corresponding increase in propagation delay was less than 0.5 ns corresponding to an increase of 50% in propagation delay of the registers. The second noise reduction method focuses on reducing simultaneous switching noise below half the clock frequency. This frequency band is assumed to be the signal band of an analog circuit. The idea is to use circuits that have as close to periodic power supply currents as possible to obtain low simultaneous switching noise below the clock in the frequency domain. For this purpose we use precharged differential cascode switch logic together with a novel D flip-flop. To evaluate the method two pipelined adders have been implemented on transistor level in a 0.13 μm CMOS technology, where the novel circuit is implemented with our method and the reference circuit with static CMOS logic together with a TSPC D flip-flop. According to simulation results, the frequency components in the analog signal band can be attenuated from 10 dB up to 17 dB using the proposed method. The cost is mainly an increase in power consumption of almost a factor of three. Comparisons between substrate coupling in silicon-on-insulator (SOI) and conventional bulk technology are made using simple models. The objective is to get an understanding of how the substrate coupling differs in SOI from the bulk technology. The results show that the SOI has less substrate coupling if no guard band is used, up to a certain frequency that is dependent of the test case. Introducing a guard band resulted in a higher attenuation of substrate noise in bulk than in SOI. An on-chip measurement circuit aiming at measuring simultaneous switching noise has been designed in a 0.13 μm SOI CMOS technology. The measuring circuit uses a single comparator per channel where several passes are used to capture the waveform. Measurements on a fabricated testchip indicate that the measuring circuit works as intended. A small part of this thesis work has been done in the area of digit representation in digital circuits. A new approach to convert a number from two’s complement representation to a minimum signed-digit representation is proposed. Previous algorithms are working either from the LSB to the MSB (right-to-left) or from the MSB to the LSB (left-to-right). The novelty in the proposed algorithm is that the conversion is done from left-to-right and right-to-left concurrently. Using the proposed algorithm, the critical path in a conversion circuit can be nearly halved compared with the previous algorithms. The area and power consumption, of the implementation of the proposed algorithm, are somewhere between the left-to-right and right-to-left implementations. / Articles I, II, III, IV, VII and IX are published with permisson from IEEE dated 07/05/18. Copyright IEEE.

In modern high-speed digital circuits, the space of the traditional single-layered or double-layered circuit board is not enough, therefore multi-layered circuit and stacked distribution technology are widely applied to many applications. The signal via is a vertical interconnection structure to communicate different signal layers, which will be seriously interfere with the simultaneous switching noise by via through the parallel plate cavity that consists of power and ground plane. It is an important issue to minimize the influence from noise. In multi-layered printed circuit boards, shorting vias are usually utilized to interconnect the planes with the same voltage level. The major theme of this thesis is the placement of shorting vias affecting plane cavity mode. And we propose a design rule of the shorting vias to significantly decrease the simultaneous switching noise and improve the power integrity of multi-layered circuit board.

In this dissertation, a new signaling scheme known as Constant Voltage Power Transmission Line (CV-PTL) is presented to supply power to a digital I/O circuit. This signaling scheme provides power through a transmission line in place of a power plane while dynamically changing the impedance of the power delivery network to keep a constant voltage at the power pin of the IC. Consequently, this reduces the effects of return path discontinuities and can improve the quality of output signal by reducing power and ground bounce. Through theory, simulation, and measurements, we show that this new method can be used to reduce jitter and eye height with the proposed PDN methodology. In addition, the signaling scheme was extended to vertically-stacked 3D integrated circuits (3D ICs). It is known that power supply noise worsens as one goes higher up in the stack of dies due to increased interconnect inductance. However, by utilizing the CV-PTL concept in the PDN design of a 3-layer 3DIC system, the circuit showed considerable improvement in power supply noise and peak-to-peak jitter as compared to the conventional design approach. In addition to signal and power integrity of these signaling schemes, the noise coupling between digital and RF components is also investigated. A simple design for mitigating the coupling of power supply noise in mixed-signal electronics is presented. Currently used methods, such as electromagnetic bandgap structures have been shown to exhibit excellent noise isolation characteristics, and are a popular area of research in this area. However, these structures can pose difficulties for signal integrity. The proposed method extends the previous power transmission line work to address both the power supply noise generation and isolation. Test vehicles using these proposed methods, as well as using an EBG structure were fabricated and tested with regards to power supply noise, jitter, and noise isolation. The proposed methods show significant improvements in almost all performance metrics as compared to EBG. Finally, this dissertation discusses the effect of implementing a power transmission line in a power distribution network composed of a switching regulator and a voltage regulator module. The DC conductor losses of the PTL can not only affect power efficiency of the entire system, but can also affect the proper operation of the linear regulator module when supporting large currents. Consequently, recommendations are made on the design of the PTL to ensure proper operation and efficiency.

The objective of this dissertation is to develop electrical modeling and co-simulation methodologies for signal and power integrity of package and board applications. The dissertation includes 1) the application of the finite element method to the optimization for decoupling capacitor selection and placement on a power delivery network (PDN), 2) the development of a PDN modeling method effective for multidimensional and multilayer geometries, 3) the analysis and modeling of return path discontinuities (RPDs), and 4) the implementation of the absorbing boundary condition for PDN modeling. The optimization technique for selection and placement of decoupling capacitors uses a genetic algorithm (GA) and the multilayer finite element method (MFEM), a PDN modeling method using FEM. The GA is customized for the decoupling problem to enhance the convergence speed of the optimization. The mathematical modifications necessary for the incorporation of the capacitor model into MFEM is also presented. The main contribution of this dissertation is the development of a new modeling method, the multilayer triangular element method (MTEM), for power/ground planes of a PDN. MTEM creates a surface mesh on each plane-pair using dual graphs; a non-uniform triangular mesh (Delaunay triangulation) and its orthogonal counterpart (Voronoi diagram), to which electromagnetic and equivalent circuit concepts are applied. The non-uniform triangulation is especially efficient for discretizing multidimensional and irregular geometries which are common in package and board PDNs. Moreover, MTEM generates a sparse, banded, and symmetric system matrix, which enables efficient computations. For a given plane-pair, MTEM extracts an equivalent circuit that is consistent with the physics-based planar-circuit model of a plane-pair. Thus, the values of the lumped elements can be simply calculated from the physical parameters, such as material properties and mesh geometries of each unit-cell. Consequently, the modeling of MTEM is flexible and easy to modify for further extensions, such as the incorporation of external circuits, e.g. decoupling capacitors and vertical interconnects. Power and ground planes provide paths for the return current of signal traces. Typically, planes have discontinuities such as via holes, plane cutouts, and split planes that disturb flow of signal return currents. At the discontinuity, return currents have to detour or switch to different layers, causing signal and power integrity problems. Therefore, a separate analysis of signal interconnects will neglect the significant coupling with a PDN, and the result will not be reliable. In this dissertation, the co-simulation of the signal and power integrity is presented focusing on the modeling of RPDs created by split planes, apertures, and vias. Plane resonance is one of the main sources of power integrity problems in package and board PDNs. A number of techniques have been developed and published in literature to reduce or prevent the resonance of a plane-pair. One of the techniques is to surround plane-pair edges with absorbing material that effectively damps the outgoing parallel-plate wave and minimizes the reflection. To model this behavior, the boundary condition of MTEM needs to be changed from its original form, the open-circuit boundary condition. In this dissertation, the application of the 1st order absorbing boundary condition to MTEM is presented.

Microelectronics is heading towards larger and larger systems implemented on a single chip. In wireless communication equipment, e.g., cellular phones, handheld computers etc., both analog and digital circuits are required. If several integrated circuits (ICs) are used in a system, a large amount of the power is consumed by the communication between the ICs. Furthermore, the communication between ICs is slow compared with on-chip communication. Therefore, it is favorable to integrate the whole system on a single chip, which is the objective in the system-on-chip (SoC) approach. In a mixed-signal SoC, analog and digital circuits share the same chip. When digital circuits are switching, they produce noise that is spread through the silicon substrate to other circuits. This noise is known as substrate noise. The performance of sensitive analog circuits is degraded by the substrate noise in terms of, e.g., lower signal-to-noise ratio and lower spurious-free dynamic range. Another problem is the design of the clock distribution net, which is challenging in terms of obtaining low power consumption, sharp clock edges, and low simultaneous switching noise. In this thesis, a noise reduction strategy that focus on reducing the amount of noise produced in digital clock buffers, is presented. The strategy is to use a clock with long rise and fall times. It is also used to relax the constraints on the clock distribution net, which also reduce the design effort. Measurements on a test chip show that the strategy can be implemented in an IC with low cost in terms of speed and power consumption. Comparisons between substrate coupling in silicon-on-insulator (SOI) and conventional bulk technology are made using simple models. The objective here is to get an understanding of how the substrate coupling differs in SOI from the bulk technology. The results show that the SOI has less substrate coupling when no guard band is used, up to a certain frequency that is highly dependent of the chip structure. When a guard band is introduced in one of the analyzed test structures, the bulk resulted in much higher attenuation compared with SOI. An on-chip measurement circuit aiming at measuring simultaneous switching noise has also been designed in a 0.13 µ SOI process. / <p>Report code: LiU-Tek-Lic-2005:33.</p>

Mixed signal system-on-package (SoP) technology is a key enabler for increasing functional integration, especially in mobile and wireless systems. Due to the presence of multiple dissimilar modules, each having unique power supply requirements, the design of the power distribution network (PDN) becomes critical. Typically, this PDN is designed as alternating layers of power and ground planes with signal interconnects routed in between or on top of the planes. The goal for the simulation of multi-layer power/ground planes, is the following: Given a stack-up and other geometrical information, it is required to find the network parameters (S/Y/Z) between port locations. Commercial packages have extremely complicated stack-ups, and the trend to increasing integration at the package level only points to increasing complexity. It is computationally intractable to solve these problems using these existing methods. The approach proposed in this thesis for obtaining the response of the PDN is the multi-layer finite difference method (M-FDM). A surface mesh / finite difference based approach is developed, which leads to a system matrix that is sparse and banded, and can be solved efficiently. The contributions of this research are the following: 1. The development of a PDN modeler for multi-layer packages and boards called the the multi-layer finite difference method. 2. The enhancement of M-FDM using multi-port connection networks to include the effect of fringe fields and gap coupling. 3. An adaptive triangular mesh based scheme called the multi-layer finite element method (MFEM) to address the limitations of M-FDM 4. The use of modal decomposition for the co-simulation of signal nets with the PDN. 5. The use of a robust GA-based optimizer for the selection and placement of decoupling capacitors in multi-layer geometries. 6. Implementation of these methods in a tool called MSDT 1.