Within-Die Gate Delay Variability Measurement Using Reconfigurable Ring Oscillator

Das, Bishnu Prasad and Amrutur, Bharadwaj and Jamadagni, HS and Arvind, NV and Visvanathan, V (2009) Within-Die Gate Delay Variability Measurement Using Reconfigurable Ring Oscillator. In: IEEE Transactions on Semiconductor Manufacturing, 22 (2). pp. 256-267.

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Abstract

We report the design and characterization of a circuit technique to measure the on-chip delay of an individual logic gate (both inverting and noninverting) in its unmodified form. The test circuit comprises of digitally reconfigurable ring oscillator (RO). The gate under test is embedded in each stage of the ring oscillator. A system of linear equations is then formed with different configuration settings of the RO, relating the individual gate delay to the measured period of the RO, whose solution gives the delay of the individual gates. Experimental results from a test chip in 65-nm process node show the feasibility of measuring the delay of an individual inverter to within 1 ps accuracy. Delay measurements of different nominally identicall inverters in close physical proximity show variations of up to 28% indicating the large impact of local variations. As a demonstration of this technique, we have studied delay variation with poly-pitch, length of diffusion (LOD) and different orientations of layout in silicon. The proposed technique is quite suitable for early process characterization, monitoring mature process in manufacturing and correlating model-to-hardware.

Item Type:	Journal Article
Publication:	IEEE Transactions on Semiconductor Manufacturing
Publisher:	IEEE
Additional Information:	Copyright 2009 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. However, permission to reprint/republish this material for advertising or promotional purposes or for creating new collective works for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or to reuse any copyrighted component of this work in other works must be obtained from the IEEE
Keywords:	Gate delay measurement; local variations; on-chip measurement; reconfigurable ring oscillator
Department/Centre:	Division of Electrical Sciences > Electronic Systems Engineering (Formerly Centre for Electronic Design & Technology) Division of Electrical Sciences > Electrical Communication Engineering
Date Deposited:	11 Dec 2009 08:43
Last Modified:	19 Sep 2010 05:33
URI:	http://eprints.iisc.ac.in/id/eprint/20568

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