Paper Info
Title
An Analytical Study of Power Delivery Systems for Many-Core Processors Using On-Chip and Off-Chip Voltage Regulators
Abstract
Design of power delivery system has great influence on the power management in many-core processor systems. Moving voltage regulators from off-chip to on-chip gains more and more interest in the power delivery system design, because it is able to provide fine-grained dynamic voltage scaling. Previous works are proposed to implement power efficient on-chip voltage regulators. It is important to analyze the characteristics of the entire power delivery system to explore the tradeoff between the promising properties and costs of employing on-chip voltage regulators, especially the on-chip buck converters. In this work, we present a novel analysis and design optimization platform of power delivery system called PowerSoC. It employs an analytical model to provide an accurate and fast evaluation of important characteristics, e.g. power efficiency, output stability and dynamic voltage scaling, for the entire power delivery system consisting of on-chip/off-chip buck converters and power delivery network. Based on our model, geometric programming is utilized to find the optimal design for different power delivery systems and explore the tradeoff of using on-chip converters. Compared with SPICE simulations, our model achieves a simulation time reduction of six to seven orders of magnitude within 5% model error for the characteristic evaluation of different power delivery systems. By using PowerSoC, various architectures of power delivery systems are optimized for power efficiency under constraints of output stability, area, etc. Simulation results show compared with the conventional architecture, the hybrid one using both on-chip and off-chip converters achieves 1.0% power efficiency improvement and 66.4% area reduction of converters on average. We conclude the hybrid architecture has potential for efficient dynamic voltage scaling, small area and the adaptability of the change of power delivery network parasitic, but careful account for the overhead of on-chip converters is - eeded.
Year
DOI
Venue
2015
10.1109/TCAD.2015.2413400
IEEE Trans. on CAD of Integrated Circuits and Systems
Keywords
DocType
Volume
analytical modeling,on-chip voltage regulator,optimization,power delivery system
Journal
PP
Issue
ISSN
Citations 
99
0278-0070
6
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.52
18
8
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Xuan Wang126319.25
Jiang Xu270461.98
Zhe Wang3797.68
Kevin J. Chen4117.09
Xiaowen Wu538026.89
Zhehui Wang626224.56
Peng Yang76410.97
Luan H. K. Duong8649.36