Design Metrics.pptVIP

Design Metrics 刘新宁 * Design Metrics How to evaluate performance of a digital circuit (gate, block, …)? Cost Reliability Speed/Performance (delay, frequency) Power dissipation Cost of Integrated Circuits NRE (Non-Recurring Engineering) costs Independent of volume Design time and effort, mask generation One-time cost factor, such as equipments Recurring costs Silicon processing, packaging, test Proportional to volume Proportional to chip area NRE Cost is Increasing Productivity Trends Die Cost Wafer Size Yield Defects Total Cost Cost per IC Cost per Transistor Reliability The real world is analog All physical quantities you deal with as a circuit designer are actually continuous Thus, even a “digital” signal can be noisy: Noise and Digital Systems Circuit needs to work despite “analog” noise Digital gates can reject noise This is actually how digital systems are defined Digital system is one where: Discrete values mapped to analog levels All the elements (gates) can reject noise For “small” amounts of noise, output noise is less than input noise Thus, for sufficient “small” noise, the system acts as if it was noiseless Noise Rejection To see if a gate rejects noise Look at its DC voltage transfer characteristic (VTC) See what happens when input is not exactly 1 or 0 Ideal digital gate Noise needs to be larger than VDD/2 to have any effect on gate output More Realistic VTC Voltage Mapping Definition of Noise Margins Digital Gate Noise Reduction:Regenerative Property Regenerative Property (Another View) Fan-in and Fan-out Key Reliability Properties Absolute noise margin values are not the only things that matter e.g., floating (high impedance) nodes are more easily disturbed than low impedance nodes (in terms of voltage) Noise immunity (i.e., how well the gate suppresses noise sources) needs to be considered too Summary of some key reliability metrics Noise transfer functions margin (ideal: gain = ∞, margin = Vdd/2) Output impedance (ideal: Ro = 0