Evaluating Adaptive Clocking for Supply-Noise Resilience in Battery-Powered Aerial Microrobotic System-on-Chip

A battery-powered aerial microrobotic System-on-Chip (SoC) has stringent weight and power budgets, which requires fully integrated solutions for both clock generation and voltage regulation. Supply-noise resilience is important yet challenging for such SoC systems due to a non-constant battery discharge profile and load current variability. This paper proposes an adaptive-frequency clocking scheme that can tolerate supply noise and improve performance when implemented with an integrated voltage regulator (IVR). Measurements from a 'brain' SoC, implemented in 40 nm CMOS, demonstrate 2 x performance improvement with adaptive-frequency clocking over conventional fixed-frequency clocking. Combining adaptive-frequency clocking with open-loop IVR extends error-free operation to a wider battery voltage range (2.8 to 3.8 V) with higher average performance.