Verification techniques for substrate coupling and their application to mixed-signal IC design

This paper presents techniques for the analysis of substrate-coupled noise in mixed-signal integrated circuits. Advantages and limitations of some commonly employed verification techniques for substrate coupling are outlined. A preprocessed boundary element method introduced in this paper utilizes precomputed z parameters to generate an analytical model for substrate impedance in a preprocessing stage. Truncated series expansions of the analytical impedance model are used to accelerate solution of the resulting boundary element equations. A methodology that applies these fast techniques to the verification of large mixed-signal circuits and results that confirm its efficiency are described. This complete methodology has been applied to the design and verification of an industrial mixed-signal video analog-to-digital converter IC for substrate noise problems.