Power Aware Placement of On-Chip Voltage Regulators

In traditional power delivery networks, the on-chip supply voltage is provided by board-level converters. Due to the significant distance between the converter and the load, variations in the load current are not effectively managed, producing a significant voltage drop at the point-of-load. To mitigate this issue, modern high performance systems utilize on-chip voltage regulators. Due to the close proximity to the load, these regulators can quickly respond to fluctuations in the input voltage or load current, providing superior power quality. Integrated voltage regulators however require significant area, limiting the number of on-chip regulators. An algorithm for distributing on-chip voltage regulators is presented in this paper. The algorithm is accelerated using the infinity mirror technique, enabling the analysis of arbitrarily sized power grids. The power quality is maximized with a limited number of regulators. Practical scenarios are supported, such as limited current capacity and restricted placement. Several orders of magnitude speedup in the placement process is demonstrated while achieving up to 88% reduction in the maximum voltage drop.