Low-Cost On-Chip Clock Jitter Measurement Scheme

In this paper we present a low cost, on-chip clock jitter digital measurement scheme for high performance microprocessors. It enables in-situ jitter measurement during the test or debug phase. It provides very high measurement resolution and accuracy, despite the possible presence of power supply noise (representing a major source of clock jitter), at low area and power costs. The achieved resolution is scalable with technology node and can in principle be increased as much as desired, at low additional costs in terms of area overhead and power consumption. We show that, for the case of high performance microprocessors employing Ring Oscillators (ROs) to measure process parameter variations, our jitter measurement scheme can be implemented by re-using part of such ROs, thus allowing to measure clock jitter with very limited cost increase compared to process parameter variation measurement only, and with no impact on parameter variation measurement resolution.