Analyzing software influences on substrate noise: an ADC perspective

Substrate noise affects the performance of mixed signal integrated circuits. Power supply (di/dt) noise is the dominant source of substrate noise. There have been various attempts at the circuit and software levels to estimate this noise. Software-level noise estimation is especially important, as designing noise tolerant circuits for all circumstances may be prohibitively expensive. In this paper, we propose a new software approach for estimating di/dt noise and incorporate it into a power simulator in order to investigate the influence of software on substrate noise. As a case study, we investigate how an analog-to-digital converter (ADC) can be designed to adapt its resolution in the presence of substrate noise generated by a embedded processor core. The proposed strategies prevent unexpected ADC performance degradations.