Synergistic Effect of Multitone EMI on the Conducted Immunity of Integrated Oscillators

The performance of two oscillator circuits, namely a current-starved voltage controlled oscillator and a ring oscillator, is compared with respect to multi-tone direct power injection (DPI). The objective is to investigate the impact of causal dependence between multi-tones on the immunity levels of integrated blocks with different architectures but similar functionality. The multi-tone immunity analysis performed using the probabilistic noisy-OR model reveals an increase in the probability of failure due to electromagnetic interference relatively to single-tone EM disturbance. The proportions of inhibition and positive causality, as well as the mean degree of synergy ( DoS ) caused by multi-tone EM disturbances, are extensively compared for both oscillator circuits.