A study of path delay variations in the presence of uncorrelated power and ground supply noise

As technology scales down, the effects of power supply noise and ground bounce are becoming significantly important. In the existing literature, it has been shown that excessive power supply noise can affect the path delay, while ground bounce is either neglected or assumed similar to power supply noise. In this work, we present a detailed study of combined and uncorrelated power supply noise and ground bounce and their impact on the path delay. Our analyses show that different combination of power supply noise and ground bounce can lead to either delay speed-up or slow-down. Furthermore, our study shows the degrading influence of supply noise resonance on the path delay. We perform HSPICE simulations for path delay analysis on various technology nodes i.e. 130nm, 90nm, 65nm and 45nm.