Silicon Demonstration of Statistical Post-Production Tuning

Towards meeting the continued demand for higher performance in analog/RF ICs, the semiconductor industry has resorted to aggressive design styles. In conjunction with the increased variation of modern processes, aggressive design jeopardizes yield and, by extension, profitability of the design. In an effort to facilitate aggressive high-performance design without compromising production yield, modern designs incorporate tuning knobs which are used after manufacturing to individually calibrate the performances of each chip, as well as some type of non-volatile memory to store the selected knob settings. In this work, we discuss a statistical post-production tuning method, which rapidly selects the appropriate knob positions using low-cost measurements, and we demonstrate it on a tunable Low Noise Amplifier which we designed and fabricated in IBM´s 130nm RF CMOS process.