High Speed, High Bandwidth On-Chip Current and Voltage Sensor

A high speed and high bandwidth on-chip sampling sensor system has been developed and realized in a standard 130 nm single-well CMOS process to measure dynamic switching currents flowing into chip sub-modules and the resulting voltage drops on power supply lines. A test chip with the primary function to compare different on-chip decoupling techniques has been equipped with the sensor and manufactured. The sensor achieved time resolution of 2 ps corresponding to 500 GHz sampling rate and a 10 bit voltage resolution. The waveforms measured with our on-chip sensor match well with the simulation results and could not be obtained by off-chip measurements. Besides power supply noise, crosstalk effects on signal and supply lines can be measured by the system without affection of measured signals coming from high impedance sources.