Separation of Individual Noise Sources from Compound Noise Measurements in Digital Circuits

Analysis of individual noise sources in pre-nanometer circuits cannot take into account the evolving reality of multiple noise sources interacting with each other. Noise measurement made at an evaluation node will reflect the cumulative effect of all the active noise sources, while individual and relative severity of various noise sources will determine what types of remedial steps can be taken, pressing the need for development of algorithms that can analyze the contributions of different noise sources when a noise measurement is available. This paper presents a method to extract the time characteristics of individual noise sources from the measured voltage in order to study the contribution of each source separately, by applying the technique of blind source separation, which is based on the assumption that the different sources of noise are statistically independent over time. The estimated noise sources can aid in timing and spectral analysis and yield better design techniques