Digital Assistant Power Integrated Technologies for PMU in Scaling CMOS Process

Several novel digital assistant power integrated technologies (DAPITs) for power management unit (PMU) to reduce the designing complexity, as well as to keep good performance in scaling CMOS process, are proposed in this paper. The DAPITs include segment power driving with pulse skip modulation/pulse width modulation and loop regulating with digital regulation circuit for dc-dcs in PMU, calibrating digital-to-analog converter (DAC) with resistance compensation network for dynamic voltage scaling (DVS), and separating phase clock for multi-dc-dcs in PMU. With these DAPITs, the efficiencies and output accuracies of dc-dcs are increased, the DVS signal sent by DAC is linear, and current ripples in PMU are reduced. In this paper, a PMU embedded into system-on-a-chip (SoC) is designed based on a 0.13-μm CMOS process. The designed PMU includes four dc-dc buck converters and two LDOs. This paper introduces the top structure of the PMU and the main proposed DAPITs. Simulation and test results show that the output voltages of the dc-dc converters in the PMU can be changed by external resistors and regulated from 0.7 to 1.8 V stepped with 25 mV by SoC load through interface. And the maximum efficiency of the dc-dcs with DVS in the PMU is more than 90%, while, with an external resistor, it can reach to 95%.