Hybrid pseudo type-III compensated AVS-enabled regulator for energy-efficient computing

Adaptive voltage scaling (AVS) regulator is proposed in the paper. Based on hybrid pseudo type-III (HPT3) compensator, the digital load is powered adaptively with operation frequency. Consequently, the power dissipation of digital circuit is reduced significantly, especially for lower operation frequency. The proposed HPT3 compensator consists of analog phase lead (APD) compensation path and delay integration (DPI) compensation path. The output voltage and the delay of critical path are feed to APD path and DPI path, respectively. The delay of critical path is then clamped to one clock cycle by setting output voltage adaptively. The proposed AVS-enabled regulator is designed with 0.13μm CMOS process. Simulation results show that the converter is well regulated over external clock frequency range of 20MHz-300MHz. The overshoot and undershoot voltage for load transient response of 400mA are smaller than 35mV and 30mV, respectively. And the recovery time is less than 3μs. The frequency tracking speed from 20MHz to 100MHz is 5μs. Compared to fixed supply voltage and DVS, up to 84.6% and energy consumption is saved by using the proposed AVS-enabled regulator.