Converter-Gating: A Power Efficient and Secure On-Chip Power Delivery System

Abstract

Dynamic power management techniques and related voltage converter architectures are proposed to design a secure and efficient on-chip power delivery system. A new power management technique, converter-gating, that adaptively turns on and off individual stages of an interleaved switched-capacitor voltage converter based on the workload information to improve the voltage conversion efficiency is proposed. Converter-gating technique is further utilized as a countermeasure against side channel power analysis attacks by pseudo-randomly controlling the converter activity. A new method is proposed to improve the response time of the converter during transient load changes by adaptively configuring the conversion ratio of a switched capacitor voltage converter. The proposed converter is designed and verified using IBM 130 nm technology kit. The proposed system achieves 5% higher power conversion efficiency compared to conventional converters, improves the response time to transient load changes from 1.4 $\mu{\rm s}$ to 104 ns and reduces the correlation between the input current and load current.