State of the Art 7 Substrate Modeling 7 Substrate Noise Sources . 8 Substrate Noise Macromodeling 9 Substrate Noise Statistical Estimation 12

This work is concerned about the design process of high performance integrated circuits in presence of noise produced by large high-speed digital circuits in the same die. In a more specific context, it deals with the early estimation of the substrate and simultaneous switching noise produced by digital circuits, its propagation and, in minor extent, its impact in the noise sensitive radio frequency (RF) circuits integrated in the same die. The main goal is to produce efficient techniques to predict the noise in the early stages of an IC design process, that can be used to guarantee the correct operation of the circuits with regard to the substrate and switching noise produced by its digital part, whereas permit an earlier interaction between the different design teams involved in the design of System on Chip Circuits (SOCs) Provided that exhaustive circuit simulations using the typical models are impossible in realistic digital circuits, because of the complexity of the circuit as well as the complexity of the substrate models, it is necessary to propose simplified models that make possible simulation without significant loss of accuracy. On the other hand, in early stages of the design no detailed circuit description is available and the input signals in the circuit are undefined, then it is necessary to build probabilistic models of switching noise and find their relationships with the basic circuit characteristics in order to make possible early noise estimation. These issues imply research on basic questions such as which are the most significant mechanism of substrate injection in complex circuits; the relation of these mechanisms with the design decisions in high and low level design of digital circuits; the implications of substrate and power distribution parasitics on noise waveforms and on their propagation inside the digital section; the real importance of an accurate switching activity definition to predict noise versus accurate modeling of package-circuit parasitics that generate resonances; the stochastic models that can reproduce better the information of the digital circuit complexity; and the information needed to characterize properly these stochastic models, among others. As an outcome of research on these topics, methodologies for substrate and switching noise estimation at different phases of the design process of a SoC will be developed. At a very young stage of the design, noise activity is considered to be a random process whose parameters are related to very basic characteristics of the digital circuit by statistical …