Analysing the Robustness of Surfing Circuits

Surfing is a technique for implementing high-speed digital pipelines that exploits the analog dynamics of the underlying circuits. Thus, verification must consider the analog behaviour of the design. We have presented a method for analysing the robustness of surfing circuits. We formulate noise margin analysis as a non-linear optimization problem where we find the smallest disturbance waveform that results in a qualitative change in the behavior of the circuit. We present a practical method for solving these optimization problems based on deriving a sensitivity matrix for the small-signal response of the circuit.