Indirect phase noise sensing for self-healing voltage controlled oscillators

The push for higher performance analog/RF circuits in scaled CMOS necessitates self-healing via post-manufacturing tuning. A major challenge with self-healing systems is the efficient design of on-chip sensors that capture the performance of interest. This is particularly difficult for metrics such as phase noise that are not easily measured on-chip. We propose an indirect sensing method that exploits the correlations between the performance metrics of interest and those that can be measured using easy-to-integrate sensors. We demonstrate indirect phase noise sensing for a 25GHz self-healing voltage controlled oscillator (VCO) design in 32nm CMOS SOI that approaches the best parametric yield achievable based on simulated results.