MEMS-Based Power Delivery Control for Bursty Applications

Alrudainy, H; Mokhov, A; Dahir, NS; Yakovlev, A

doi:10.1109/ISCAS.2016.7527359

MEMS-Based Power Delivery Control for Bursty Applications

Lookup NU author(s): Haider Alrudainy, Dr Andrey Mokhov, Nizar Dahir, Professor Alex Yakovlev ORCiD

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Abstract

The current trends for greater heterogeneity in future Systems-on-Chip (SoC) do not only concern their functionality but also their timing and power aspects. The increasing diversity of timing and power supply conditions, and associated concurrently operating modes, within an SoC calls for more efficient power delivery networks (PDN) for battery operated devices. This is especially important for systems with mixed duty cycling, where some parts are required to work regularly with low-throughput while other parts are activated spontaneously, i.e. in bursts. To improve their reaction time vs energy efficiency, this paper proposes to incorporate a power-switching network based on MEM relays to switch the SoC power-performance state (PPS) into an active mode while eliminating the leakage current when it is idle. Results show that even with todays large and high pull-in voltages, a MEM-relay-based power switching network (PSN) can achieve a 1000x saving in energy compared to its CMOS counterpart for low duty cycle. Finally, the paper presents, by means of multiphysics simulation results, design guidelines for idle time and energy-saving estimates as a function of MEM relay scaling parameters.