Solving Clock Signal Integrity And Jitter Issues


A recent blog post discussed the challenges of clock signal integrity and clock jitter in deep submicron semiconductor devices. Nice, clean clock signals are degraded due to many factors, including noise in the power delivery network (PDN). Timing variation due to clock jitter is also a serious issue, especially for chips operating at low voltage with high frequencies. The impact due to cloc... » read more

Evaluating A PDN Based On Jitter


Power distribution networks (PDN) must supply current fast enough to meet the switching needs of high-performance integrated circuits. As the voltage regulator module can only supply current up to a limited frequency range, decoupling capacitors are added to the PDN to provide a low impedance path for current to flow to the IC. This paper describes a simulation methodology to automatically meas... » read more

Noise: A Chip Killer


Noise has always been important to communications experts, but it's quickly becoming an issue that every semiconductor designer has to contend with. Some chips already have been compromised. Noise can be defined as any deviation from the ideal that can impact intended functionality. When it comes to semiconductors, that could mean the ability to reliably extract a signal value at the intende... » read more

How To Solve Frequency Jitter In Constant On-Time POLs With A Ripple Injection Circuit


The purpose of this article is to walk through the steps of implementing a ripple injection circuit for constant on-time POLs. It covers how to connect the circuit and then how to calculate the values used in the circuit. Frequency jitter can be caused by a number of things such as noise injection into the voltage sense lines from outside sources, to very low ripple current in the output ind... » read more

Testing PCI Express 5.0 PHY Transmitter Performance Without Analysis Software


PCI Express (PCIe) 5.0 silicon characterization across process, voltage, and temperature variations, is necessary for accelerating SoC designs. To measure key qualifying parameters, designers and test engineers must have a good understanding of the PCIe 5.0 base electrical specification and know the physical layer’s design architecture and features for accurate characterization of 32GT/s PHY ... » read more

Power Supply Noise Effects On Jitter In Clock Synchronous Systems With Emphasis On Memory Interfaces


In today's fast-paced digital world, the performance and capacity of high-speed memory has become crucial for a wide range of applications, from personal computing devices to data centers and high-performance computing systems. Designers face challenges in optimizing their designs for speed, power efficiency, and reliability — all while ensuring robustness in the face of power supply noise. T... » read more

Power Supply Noise Effects On Jitter In Clock Synchronous Systems With Emphasis On Memory Interfaces


Power Supply Noise Effects on Jitter in Clock Synchronous Systems with Emphasis on LPDDR5X, DDR5 and HBM3 In today's fast-paced digital world, the performance and capacity of high-speed memory has become crucial for a wide range of applications, from personal computing devices to data centers and high-performance computing systems. Designers face challenges in optimizing their designs ... » read more

Jitter Budgeting For Clock Distribution Networks In High-Speed PHYs And SerDes


This paper presents a simple but practically precise estimation of periodic single-tone power supply induced jitter (PSIJ) for MOS clock buffer chains. The estimation is algebraically simple for its analytical closed-form expression requiring only a few circuit simulation results without the pre-knowledge of circuit device SPICE parameters. The expression is well suited to predict period PSIJ, ... » read more

Dynamic CDC Jitter For Clock Domain Crossing (CDC) Signoff


By Himanshu Bhatt and Paras Mal Jain Detecting and debugging deep sequential CDC convergences using structural CDC verification is extremely difficult since doing a flat analysis on large designs has capacity related challenges, and even if verification tools can complete the analysis, it becomes a nightmare to debug the violations with complex sequential logic. Thus arises the need for dyna... » read more

Wrestling With High-Speed SerDes


SerDes has emerged as the primary solution in chips where there is a need for fast data movement and limited I/O, but this technology is becoming significantly more challenging to work with as speeds continue to rise to offset the massive increase in data. A Serializer/Deserializer is used to convert parallel data into serial data, allowing designers to speed up data communication without h... » read more

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