An on-chip active decoupling circuit to suppress crosstalk in deep-submicron CMOS mixed-signal SoCs

A decoupling circuit using an operational amplifier is proposed to suppress substrate crosstalk in mixed-signal system-on-chip (SoC) devices. It overcomes the parasitic inductance problem of on-chip capacitor decoupling. The effect of the proposed decoupling circuit is not limited by parasitic fine impedance. A 0.13-μm CMOS test chip showed that substrate noise at frequencies from 40 MHz to 1 GHz was incrementally suppressed by sequentially activating three of the proposed circuits in parallel. The power dissipation of each circuit was 3.3 mW at a 1.0-V power supply. The test chip measurement showed that the proposed decoupling reduced crosstalk by 31% at 200 MHz, whereas it was reduced by 4.4% with capacitor decoupling. This 7:1 ratio, or 17 dB, corresponds to the gain of the opamp. Design of the opamp and its feedback loop for active decoupling is simple, making the opamp useful for SoC applications.