Parameter specific supply voltage scaling by evaluating the frequency of an onchip ring-inverter-chain

Designing analog or digital circuits makes it necessary to consider worst case parameters to maintain specifications. This means for most chips, that they are running on higher supply voltage than necessary. This work deals with the development of a system, which measures the switching frequency of an onchip ring-inverter-chain, which is strongly correlated to process variations due to manufacturing. Further more, the system is able to sense core temperature and provides a case-typical output signal, which is a digital word, or an analog reference voltage, for creating a chip-individual supply voltage using the conventional DCDC converters in order to minimize energy consumption.