A Customized On-die Oscilloscope for Monitoring of Noise Waveforms inside IC Due to ESD

Abstract

An on-die oscilloscope circuit is proposed to monitor the power noise waveforms inside IC due to the electrostatic discharge (ESD) events for a more complete analysis of the effects of the ESD on the electronic systems. When an ESD event occurs, the induced noise voltage waveform in the power supply is sampled and converted to digital data in real time. A holding signal created by the ESD detector circuit is used to hold the digital data. The stored digital data are read and converted back to the analog noise waveform based on the sampling process. The operation of each circuit block in the monitoring IC is analyzed and validated by measurement results. The delay between eight clock signals from the DLL is about 200ps for 620MHz input clock as expected. The power noise waveforms due to the ESD events are measured with a digital oscilloscope instrument using cables and directly sampled by the on-die oscilloscope with a sampling rate of 5GHz and 1.6GHz. These sampled noises are converted and reconstructed into analog noise waveforms, and then compared to the noises measured by the digital oscilloscope.