Analysis of coupling noise in dynamic circuit

Abstract

Noise has become an important metric of deep submicron digital integrated circuit performance, and is becoming even more prominent due to the increasing usage of noise sensitive dynamic circuits for speed and area requirements. This paper presents closed form analytical solutions for noise as well as noise tolerance metrics for dynamic circuits to analyze the effects of coupling, which is considered as the dominant source of noise. These solutions are within 5% of dynamic simulations. It is shown that not all the scaling trends are negative for noise, and that the scaling down of supply voltage and increasing frequency help improve certain aspects of the noise immunity of dynamic circuit. Most of the work treated noise immunity and the noise content separately. This paper introduces a positive analysis of noise scalability by looking at the noise immunity and the noise content simultaneously.