A Low-Power Active Substrate-Noise Decoupling Circuit with Feedforward Compensation for Mixed-Signal SoCs

Abstract

This paper presents a low-power active-decoupling circuit using feedforward-compensation technique for SoC substrate-noise reduction. The proposed feedforward technique not only generates a left-half-plane zero for the decoupling circuit achieving stability and wider bandwidth in low-power condition, but also increases the dynamic current during transient. As a result, substrate-noise suppression has been significantly improved with larger-amplitude and higher-frequency noise sources. In a standard 0.13mum CMOS process, simulation results show that the proposed feedforward technique enhances both the bandwidth and dynamic current of the decoupling circuit by 2 and 79 times, respectively, without additional static power consumption. The decoupling circuit thus improves the crosstalk noise suppression from 3.6 to 6.6 times with a 1GHz noise-source amplitude increasing from 100mV to 500mV