A 10-MHz Green-Mode Automatic Recon figurable Switching Converter for DVS-Enabled VLSI Systems Chen Zheng, Student Member , IEEE

Abstract

A power-ef ficient, high-frequency, automatic recon- figurable switching converter is presented in this p aper for DVS- enabled VLSI systems. Tailored to the system-level power man- agement, the proposed cross-laye red green-mode (GM) operation scheme adaptively con figures the converter into three operation structures to achieve a seamless step-up/down voltage conversion with minimized power loss. In addition, an adaptive power tran- sistor sizing (APTS) scheme is incorpor ated to further improve ef- ficiency on the transistor level. To enable high-frequency opera- tion in all power regulation conditions, an -assisted single-bound hysteresis controller (SBHC) is also proposed in this work. Mean- while, in order to suppress output spectrum variations induced by the hysteresis controller, an adaptive frequency compensator (AFC) is employed. The proposed converter was fabricated with IBM 130-nm CMOS process, with a total chip area of 1 mm .I t s output voltage can be seamlessly regulated from 0.9 to 2.2 V , with a maximum load power of 400 mW. The input voltage is designed at 1.5 V , but is variable at any level between 0.9 and 1.8 V. The switching frequency of the converter is regulated at 10 MHz in all three operation modes, wit h 3% deviation. Experimental results show a 26.7- s/V down-tracking and 93.3- s/V up-tracking speed for dynamic voltage scaling (DVS) r eference tracking. Line regu- lation is maintained b elow 0.8% throughout the full input voltage range, with a lowest v