On-Chip Analog Circuit Diagnosis in Systems-on-Chip Integration

A highly multi-channel on-chip signal monitor establishes analog circuit diagnosis against environmental disturbances in SoCs. A 0.18-mum CMOS experimental on-chip test bench embeds an array of 53 distributed probes followed by a single shared waveform acquisition kernel, enabling on- and off-chip cooperative high-throughput digitization of 330 ms per sample point with adaptive 10-bit timing and voltage resolutions at the minimum LSB of 100 ps and 400 V. Analog signals of interest in a 1.5-bit conversion stage of pipeline ADC are evaluated in terms of their response to substrate noises globally existing in a chip. Through this on-chip diagnosis we derive in-depth findings relating to dynamic, large-signal, and sensitive behaviors of analog circuits in a real SoC environment, far beyond simulations with inevitably limited capacity