Clock Skew Reduction by Self-Compensating Manufacturing Variability with On-chip Sensors

摘要

This paper presents a self-compensation scheme of manufacturing variability for clock skew reduction. In the proposed scheme, a CDN with embedded variability sensors tunes variable clock drivers for canceling the clock skew induced by manufacturing variability. We apply the proposed scheme for a mesh-style CDN in a 65nm technology and evaluate the deskewing effect as a function of the sensor performance. Experimental results show that the skew can be reduced by over 70% and the correlation coefficient between estimated and actual variabilities, which represents the sensor performance, should be more than 0.3 for skew reduction.