Early-Stage Planning of Switched-Capacitor Converters in a Heterogeneous Chip

Abstract

The switched-capacitor converter (SCC) has been widely used for voltage regulation in multicore chips, where energy efficiency is the major concern. However as the overhead to integrate SCCs in a chip is non-negligible, the SCCs could not be overused. Hence in this paper we propose an early stage SCCs planning framework to obtain the SCC supply scheme together with the optimized Metal-Insulator-Metal (MIM) capacitance allocation and converter ratio selection for each SCC when the given number of SCCs is less than the number of cores. Besides, our method could also explore to find the best number of used SCCs for a given chip. The experiments show the results of our SCC planning methods.