Wide Operational Range Processor Power Delivery Design for Both Super-Threshold Voltage and Near-Threshold Voltage Computing

Abstract

The load power range of modern processors is greatly enlarged because many advanced power management techniques are employed, such as dynamic voltage frequency scaling, Turbo Boosting, and near-threshold voltage (NTV) technologies. However, because the efficiency of power delivery varies greatly with different load conditions, conventional power delivery designs cannot maintain high efficiency over the entire voltage spectrum, and the gained power saving may be offset by power loss in power delivery. We propose SuperRange, a wide operational range power delivery unit. SuperRange complements the power delivery capability of on-chip voltage regulator and off-chip voltage regulator. On top of SuperRange, we analyze its power conversion characteristics and propose a voltage regulator (VR) aware power management algorithm. Moreover, as more and more cores have been integrated on a singe chip, multiple SuperRange units can serve as basic building blocks to build, in a highly scalable way, more powerful power delivery subsystem with larger power capacity. Experimental results show SuperRange unit offers 1x and 1.3x higher power conversion efficiency (PCE) than other two conventional power delivery schemes at NTV region and exhibits an average 70% PCE over entire operational range. It also exhibits superior resilience to power-constrained systems.