Abstract
For highly integrated SoC, especially for mobile applications, precise power management is necessary to extend the battery life and alleviate the heat handling difficulty in package. In SoCs, power converter is usually the hot spot, because it has to deal with power conversion function in chip level. For 3D-IC integration, this problem will severe since the power module may be buried within the stacked layers. In addition to develop a new heat conduction mechanism, this work proposes a multi-phase power converter with distributed temperature-aware power modules. By distributing the power modules and combining the temperature information, this current-mode control buck converter achieves adaptive job assignment based on the real-time temperature monitoring. The 1.8-V output buck converter IC is fabricated in 0.35µm CMOS process. The efficiency is higher than 76% for the load demands from 20 mA to 300 mA with PWM and PFM dual-mode operation.