Ivory: Early-Stage Design Space Exploration Tool for Integrated Voltage Regulators

Citation:

A. Zou, et al., “Ivory: Early-Stage Design Space Exploration Tool for Integrated Voltage Regulators,” in Proceedings of the 54th Annual Design Automation Conference (DAC), 2017, pp. 1.
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Abstract:

Despite being employed in burgeoning eforts to improve power delivery eiciency, integrated voltage regulators (IVRs) have yet to be evaluated in a rigorous, systematic, or quantitative manner. To fulill this need, we present Ivory, a high-level design space exploration tool capable of providing accurate conversion eiciency, static performance characteristics, and dynamic transient responses of an IVR-enabled power delivery subsystem (PDS), enabling rapid trade-of exploration at early design stage, approximately 1000x faster than SPICE simulation. We demonstrate and validate Ivory with a wide spectrum of IVR topologies. In addition, we present a case study using Ivory to reveal the optimal PDS conigurations, with underlying power break-downs and area overheads for the GPU manycore architecture, which has yet to embrace IVRs.

 

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Last updated on 05/30/2019