Variation-aware Adaptation of Heterogeneous Voltage Regulation Systems
Abstract
The Power delivery network (PDN) is an electrical system that provides the supply voltage to transistors on a silicon chip. With the development of CMOS technology, the transistor density increases exponentially. However, the supply voltage and the threshold voltage of transistors have limited room to be further reduced, which leads to a huge increment in chip power density.
Besides, the areas of chips like server-class CPUs are also increasing in order to integrate more transistors on a chip and fully leverage the benefits of parallelism. Designing PDNs for these power-hungry and large-scale chips has become a challenge.
In recent years, PDNs with distributed on-chip voltage regulation have emerged as a novel design solution to deliver power to transistors with high efficiency as well as ensured quality in many research works and commercial products. With distributed on-chip voltage regulators (VRs), PDNs with distributed on-chip voltage regulation reduce the demands on power pins.
They also provide fast suppression of voltage noise thanks to the reduced proximity between the VRs and current loads. Recently, heterogeneous voltage regulation (HVR) architecture was proposed to provide high-efficiency power delivery and high-performance voltage regulation by utilizing heterogeneous on-chip and off-chip VRs \cite{xin_hvr}. However, the effects of inevitable process and temperature variations on the system efficiency and power integrity were not evaluated.
In this thesis, a variation-aware adaption of the HVR architecture has been proposed to adapt HVR to systems with process and temperature variations using variation tracking circuits and variation-aware control policy. It improves system efficiency by 1.13% on average, while ensuring a given power integrity specification in the presence of process variations. In addition, the HVR architecture is found to possess some degree of robustness to temperature and process variations
Subject
Power Delivery NetworkHeterogeneous Voltage Regulation
Process Variation
Temperature Variation
Citation
Chen, Jianhao (2020). Variation-aware Adaptation of Heterogeneous Voltage Regulation Systems. Master's thesis, Texas A&M University. Available electronically from https : / /hdl .handle .net /1969 .1 /192218.