Analysing the Robustness of Surfing Circuits

We consider the robustness of surfing circuits. Surfing is a technique for implementing highspeed digital pipelines that exploits the analog dynamics of the underlying circuits. Thus, verification must consider the analog behaviour of the design. In this extended abstract, we give a description of surfing in section 2 to make the abstract self-contained. Section 3 presents a method for analysing the sensitivity of surfing circuits to small-signal disturbances by approximating the continuous time system as a sampledtime one and computing the eigenvalues of the appropriate sensitivity matrix. In section 4 we briefly sketch results from using our approach. We go on to show how the small-signal analysis provides a basis for exploring large-scale, non-linear behaviours by examining the noise margins of our circuits.