Proactive Power Regulation with Real-time Prediction and Fast Response Guardband for Fine-grained Dynamic Voltage Droop Mitigation on Digital SoCs

Abstract

A proactive power regulation scheme for mitigating dynamic supply droop is proposed with a fully-integrated buck converter, a CPU core and a real-time machine learning (ML) engine. Combined with droop guardband circuits, the proactive scheme demonstrates up to 9.9% higher CPU frequency or 9.2% higher power efficiency compared with prior fast LDO scheme or conventional converters using a 65 nm test chip.