Kevin Tien, Noah Sturcken, Naigang Wang, Jae-woong Nah, Bing Dang, Eugene O’Sullivan, Paul Andry, Michele Petracca, Luca P. Carloni, William Gallagher, Kenneth Shepard “An 82%-Efficient Multiphase Voltage-Regulator 3D Interposer with On-Chip Magnetic Inductors,” VLSI Circuits Digest of Technical Papers, 2015 Symposium on, vol., no., pp.1,2, 16-19 June 2015.

This paper presents a three-dimensional (3D) fully integrated high-speed multiphase voltage regulator. A complete switched-inductor regulator is integrated with a four-plane NoC in a two-high chip stack combining integrated magnetics, through-silicon vias (TSVs), and 45-nm SOI CMOS devices. Quasi-V2 hysteretic control is implemented over eight injection-locked fixed-frequency phases to achieve fast response, steady-state regulation, and fixed switching frequency. Peak efficiency of 82% for conversion from 1.66 V to 0.83 V is observed at a 150 MHz per-phase switching frequency. This is the first demonstration of high-speed voltage regulation using on-chip magnetic-core inductors in a 3D stack and achieves sub-μs dynamic supply voltage scaling for high-density embedded processing applications.