Power Integrity Analysis of a 28 nm Dual-Core ARM Cortex-A57 Cluster Using an All-Digital Power Delivery Monitor

This paper presents a power delivery monitor (PDM) peripheral integrated in a flip-chip packaged 28 nm system-on-chip (SoC) for mobile computing. The PDM is composed entirely of digital standard cells and consists of: 1) a fully integrated VCO-based digital sampling oscilloscope; 2) a synthetic current load; and 3) an event engine for triggering, analysis, and debug. Incorporated inside an SoC, it enables rapid, automated analysis of supply impedance, as well as monitoring supply voltage droop of multi-core CPUs running full software workloads and during scan-test operations. To demonstrate these capabilities, we describe a power integrity case study of a dual-core ARM Cortex-A57 cluster in a commercial 28 nm mobile SoC. Measurements are presented of power delivery network (PDN) electrical parameters, along with waveforms of the CPU cluster running test cases and benchmarks on bare metal and Linux OS. The effect of aggressive power management techniques, such as power gating on the dominant resonant frequency and peak impedance, is highlighted. Finally, we present measurements of supply voltage noise during various scan-test operations, an often-neglected aspect of SoC power integrity.