Researchers at the University of South Florida have de-veloped a regulator-gating technique that improves the on-chip voltage conversion efficiency.
Design-for-power has become one of the primary objectives with the continuous demand to improve the battery life of mo-bile devices or minimize the cooling costs of servers. To save power and mitigate thermal emergencies, circuits typically enter reduced power states when the workload is light. Voltage regu-lators, however, operate indifferently under varying workload conditions due to the lack of different operating modes. When a voltage regulator is optimized for a particular load current, sig-nificant power is dissipated during voltage conversion while de-livering a different load current. Adaptive activity management of on-chip voltage regulators based upon the workload infor-mation can be exploited to force each on -chip regulator to oper-ate in its most power-efficient load current.
USF inventors have developed a regulator-gating technique, whereby regulators are adaptively turned on/off when the cur-rent demand is high/low to improve the voltage conversion effi-ciency. With this technique, the overall voltage conversion effi-ciency from the battery or off -chip power supply to the output of on-chip voltage regulators is improved by 5% to 20% as well as providing fast turn on capability.
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