Substrate noise coupling in RF receiver front-end circuitry for LTE wireless communication was examined by full-chip level simulation and on-chip measurements, with a demonstrator built in a 65nm CMOS technology. A CMOS digital noise emulator injects high-order harmonic noises in a silicon substrate and induces in-band spurious tones in an RF receiver on the same chip through substrate noise interference. A complete simulation flow of full-chip level substrate noise coupling uses a decoupled modeling approach, where substrate noise waveforms drawn with a unified package-chip model of noise source circuits are given to mixed-level simulation of RF chains as noise sensitive circuits. The distribution of substrate noise in a chip and the attenuation with distance are simulated and compared with the measurements. The interference of substrate noise at the 17th harmonics of 124.8MHz — the operating frequency of the CMOS noise emulator creates spurious tones in the communication bandwidth at 2.1GHz.

Capacitor charging modeling efficiently and accurately represents power consumption current of CMOS digital circuits and actualizes co-simulation of AC power noise including the interaction with on-chip and on-board integrated power delivery network (PDN). It is clearly demonstrated that the AC power noise is dominantly characterized by the frequency-dependent impedance of PDN and also by the operating frequency of circuits as well. A 65 nm CMOS chip exhibits the AC power noise components in substantial relation with the parallel resonance of the PDN seen from on-chip digital circuits. An on-chip noise monitor measures in-circuit power supply voltage, while a near-field magnetic probing derives on-board power supply current. The proposed co-simulation well matches the power noise measurements. The proposed AC noise co-simulation will be essentially applicable in the design of PDNs toward on-chip power supply integrity (PSI) and off-chip electromagnetic compatibility (EMC).