EChO power management unit with reconfigurable switched-capacitor converter in 65 nm CMOS

In this paper, a novel reconfigurable power management unit (PMU) is introduced. Its reconfigurable switched capacitor array permits for the first time to reduce the energy cost associated with sleep-to-active and active-to sleep transitions by 64%. This energy reduction comes at small area overhead (lower than 1%) and no penalty in active mode. Measurements on a 65-nm testchip comprising of PMU with integrated logic and memory show that energy savings enabled by our technique are in the order of 30% in practical cases.