Package Voltage Regulators: The Answer for Power Management Challenges

Abstract

Abstract The generational scaling of CMOS device geometries, as predicted by Moore's law, has significantly outpaced advances in CMOS package and power electronics technology. The conduction of power to a high-performance integrated circuit (IC) die typically requires close to 50% of package and IC I/O and is increasing with trends towards lower supply voltages and higher power density that occur in advanced CMOS nodes. The disparity in scaling of logic, package, and I/O technology has created a significant bottleneck that has become a dominant constraint on computational performance. By performing power conversion and voltage regulation in-package, this limitation can be mitigated. Integration of thin-film ferromagnetic inductors with CMOS technology enables single-chip power converters to be co-packaged with processors, high bandwidth memory (HBM), and/or other modules. This paper highlights the advantages of fully integrated package voltage regulators (PVRs), which include: reducing package I/O allocated for power, eliminating the need for upstream power-conversion stages, and improving transient response. These benefits substantially reduce the size, weight, and power of modern electronic systems.