Shortstop: An on-chip fast supply boosting technique

Fast boosting of supply rails is critical for near-threshold computing to overcome serial code bottlenecks. A novel supply boosting technique, called Shortstop, boosts a 3nF core in 26ns while maintaining acceptable supply voltage droops. The innate parasitic inductance of a dedicated dirty supply rail is used as a boost-converter and combined with an on-chip boost capacitor. Shortstop boosts a core up to 1.8× faster than a header-based approach, while reducing supply droop by 2-7×.