Efficiency, Stability, and Reliability Implications of Unbalanced Current Sharing Among Distributed On-Chip Voltage Regulators

Power delivery networks with distributed on-chip voltage regulators (VRs) serve as an effective way for fast localized voltage regulation within modern microprocessors. Without careful consideration of the interactions among the distributed VRs and the power grid, unbalanced current sharing (CS) among those regulators may, however, lead to efficiency degradations, stability, and reliability issues, and even malfunctions of the regulators. This paper is a first attempt to investigate the efficiency, stability, and reliability implications of unbalanced CS among distributed on-chip VRs. Benefits of balanced CS are demonstrated with concrete examples, showing the necessity of an appropriate current balancing scheme. An adaptive reference voltage control method and the corresponding control algorithms specifically for distributed on-chip VRs are proposed to balance the CS among regulators at different locations. The proposed techniques successfully balance the CS among distributed VRs and can be applied to different regulator types. Simulation results based on practical microprocessor setups confirm the efficiency, stability, and reliability implications.

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