BOOK PROSPECTUS Power Integrity for Nanoscale Integrated Systems

Power Integrity (PI), as it relates to everyday life, is the stability and robustness of the electrical power supply to homes and businesses. For example, how stable is the 115V AC supply voltage level? How stable is its frequency (60 cycles a second) that determines time accuracy in simple electrical clock mechanisms? How steady is this supply when an air-conditioner system's large compressor kicks on and pulls substantial current and power from this supply? Do the lights dim when one turns on a food grinder/mixer in the kitchen? Does the transient disturbance in the supply 'reset' any electronic device? Very similar concerns apply to highly integrated electronic systems as well, such as those in the nanoscale fabrication regimes. Most integrated circuit (IC, chip) supplies are " DC " , or constant-potential difference supplies. Here, concerns relate to how constant this potential difference remains within the chip, how does the difference diminish or expand based upon sections of an integrated circuit turning on and off, the power spectral content of such variations etc. Static and dynamic changes in this power supply potential difference impact integrated circuit performance in detrimental ways, therefore necessitating accurate evaluation of such changes for any IC design and their impact upon overall chip performance. As chips continue to scale according to Moore's Law (which predicted that the number of transistors per unit area of a chip doubles approximately every 18 months), and progress to holistic integration (sometimes referred to as "More-than-Moore" [a catch phrase for everything from exaggerated integration ambitions to advertisement for a FAB] or the non-traditional integration of dissimilar technologies and diverse functionalities on a single chip), PI challenges continue to increase at an alarming rate. For example, where transistors double in a digital chip area, noise doubles too… but this has remained largely unnoticed by the electronic design automation industry. chip and system power consumption has shown an alarming and unexpected trend of increasing, rather than decreasing, as technology scales. Additionally, operating frequencies are increasing steadily, leading to sharper digital signal transitions and therefore higher frequency content in supply currents that amplifies inductive noise. Inductive noise is harder to compute