Charge-borrowing decap: A novel circuit for removal of local supply noise violations

We propose a novel circuit called charge-borrowing decap (CBD) as a drop-in replacement for passive decaps to reduce supply noise for removal of ldquohot-spotrdquo IR-drop problems found late in the design process. Measurement results on a 90 nm test chip show that a noise reduction improvement between 42%-55% at 100 MHz-1.5 GHz over its passive counterpart.