Efficient and reliable power delivery in voltage-stacked manycore system with hybrid charge-recycling regulators

Abstract

Voltage stacking (VS) fundamentally improves power delivery efficiency (PDE) by series-stacking multiple voltage domains to eliminate explicit step-down voltage conversion and reduce energy loss along the power delivery path. However, it suffers from aggravated supply noise, preventing its adoption in mainstream computing systems. In this paper, we investigate a practical approach to enabling efficient and reliable power delivery in voltage-stacked manycore systems that can ensure worst-case supply noise reliability without excessive costly over-design. We start by developing an analytical model to capture the essential noise behaviors in VS. It allows us to identify dominant noise contributor and derive the worst-case conditions. With this in-depth understanding, we propose a hybrid voltage regulation solution to effectively mitigate noise with worst-case guarantees. When evaluated with real-world benchmarks, our solution can achieve 93.8% power delivery efficiency, an improvement of 13.9% over the conventional baseline.