Mitigation of thermally induced crosstalk noise by dynamically adjusting driver strength

Space between interconnects is shrinking and its increasing aspect ratio is causing modern VLSI circuit to be more prone to crosstalk noise. Moreover, modern high-performance CMOS circuits are more power consuming, resulting in the chip experiencing higher temperature. As a consequence of this high temperature, CMOS driver strength reduces which introduces a new reliability concern, thermally induced crosstalk noise, which is addressed in this research work for the very first time in literature. This superimposing with the normal crosstalk can cause the VLSI circuit to fail by toggling the logic or bit flipping. In this paper, our goal is to provide a solution to mitigate the thermally induced crosstalk noise by dynamically adjusting gate voltage to keep driver strength the same despite changing temperature. We propose a temperature sensor that generates the necessary voltage to the gate to keep driver strength constant. Using 10-p modelling for interconnect in 45nm technology, we explore the effect of on-chip temperature gradient on crosstalk noise. Our simulation result demonstrates that the proposed method successfully mitigates thermally induced crosstalk noise up to 85% in the worst case temperature scenario.