Emerging on-board power architectures

In recent years, the feature size of silicon devices has decreased at a steady rate. Each step in feature size has required a reduction in operating voltage. As today's system designers seek to maximize performance, they use a wide variety of integrated circuits. The result is a system that requires many different supply voltages for various devices in the system. It is not unusual for a system today to require seven or eight different voltages and systems with twelve or more voltages are not uncommon. To meet this challenge, the traditional distributed power architecture has been extended to create the intermediate bus architecture. This paper explores the Intermediate Bus Architecture and highlights areas of special concern to system and power system developers.