Noise in interconecction lines for submicrometer CMOS integrated circuits

The growing use of high performance portable systems is the main driving force for the significant advance in the technology of VLSI-CMOS integrated circuits. This advance has been carried out through scaling the transistor and interconnection sizes. However, as the transistor´s size and interconnections are getting smaller, the signal integrity is becoming a critical issue. Therefore it is required to develop noise tolerant design circuit techniques in order to enhance the noise tolerance. In addition, these techniques should have a minimum impact on the circuit performance. In this paper, the noise immunity of dynamic logical circuits as the technology scales down is analyzed by using a reliable scaling scenario, and a new noise tolerant design technique is proposed. Prototype circuits implementing the proposed technique have been designed and fabricated. A one-bit carry look-ahead adder was designed using 0.35 mm CMOS-AMS technology. The experimental results show that the design technique here presented, results in an improvement of the ANTE by a factor of 3.4X when compared with the conventional TSPC, and an improvement by a factor of 1.7X when compared with the best noise tolerant technique currently published.