An area efficient on-chip static IR drop detector/evaluator

As the supply voltage shrinks with technology scaling, the slightest drop in the voltage level has a significant impact on chip functionality. It is, therefore, important to accurately measure supply voltage noise to evaluate the actual IR drop on-chip and to feed the results to a power management unit, which can scale the voltage and perform on-chip compensation based on the IR drop. In this paper, we propose a detection scheme based on a ring oscillator, which can detect and evaluate static IR drop on-chip with minimal additional area and design complexity.