Accurate in situ measurement of peak noise and delay change induced by interconnect coupling

An accurate in situ noise and delay measurement technique that considers interconnect coupling effects is presented. This paper improves upon previous work by proposing 1) a novel accurate peak detector to measure on-chip crosstalk noise, and 2) in situ measurement structure to characterize the dynamic delay effect. A test chip was fabricated using 0.35-μm process and measured results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed technique. Noise peak measurements show 40-60 mV (1.8% average) accuracy to simulation results and dynamic delay change curve match well with SPICE. The proposed measurement technique can be used for interconnect model verification and calibration, and has applications to various design automation tools such as noise-aware static timing analysis.