Fully-integrated multi-phase voltage regulators featuring fast DVS, high power-density, and inter-inductor current balancing

Abstract

To achieve energy-efficient processing in High-Performance Computing (HPC), it's crucial to efficiently supply the required power to the processor through power management circuits. Traditional power management approaches that rely on large external components often cannot keep up with the rapid demands of processors, leading to inefficient power usage. For this reason, there has been significant research on fully-integrated voltage regulators (FIVRs) that integrate passive components into Integrated Circuits (ICs) to quickly respond to processor demands. Particularly, HPC applications that require very high power levels, the need for Multi-phase (MP) power sources, which use multiple inductors to deliver significant power to the processor, has become increasingly important. In this thesis, converters are presented that addresses the issue of current imbalance in MP-FIVRs by using flying capacitors and also maximizes the utilization of die area to achieve fast operational characteristics across a wide range of load currents.