THERMOMETER ENCODING AND GANGING OF POWER GATES

• Main Authors: Hodgson, James Keith, Ramasundar, Anand, Rodriguez, Sergio Carlo, Matthew, George, Chen, Po-Cheng, Renzema, Cary, Hyvonen, Sami, Chilka, Sandeep, Paillet, Fabrice, Soundararajan, Bharadwaj
• Format: Patent
• Language: English
• Published: 29.06.2023
• Subjects: BASIC ELECTRONIC CIRCUITRY; CODE CONVERSION IN GENERAL; CODING; CONTROLLING; DECODING; ELECTRICITY; PHYSICS; REGULATING; SYSTEMS FOR REGULATING ELECTRIC OR MAGNETIC VARIABLES

A digitally selectable power gate with thermometer-encoded upper bits may provide solutions for problems digital power gate-based regulators. These solutions may include the use of a fully binary power gate, either in structure or by local decoding of binary control signal to an addressable row-based power gate. This provides improved performance over a row-based code rotation, which is intended to avoid instantaneous overheating of power gate devices but may not mitigate aging effects. Another solution includes ganging a primary DLVR and one or more secondaries. The primary DLVR may include a voltage sense and active controller, which may forward its PG code to secondary instances. Therm and current sensor rotation may be performed locally at the secondaries and a current monitor data may be rolled up from all ganged DLVRs.