Tutorial: Design and Optimization of Power Delivery Networks

The era of the Internet of Things (IoT) is upon us. In this era, minimizing power consumption becomes a primary concern for system-on-chip designers. While traditional power minimization and dynamic power management (DPM) techniques have been heavily explored to improve the power efficiency of devices inside very large-scale integration (VLSI) platforms, there is one critical factor that is often overlooked, which is the power conversion efficiency of a power delivery network (PDN). This paper is a tutorial that focuses on the power conversion efficiency of the PDN, and introduces novel methods to improve it. Circuit-, architecture-, and system-level approaches are presented to optimize PDN designs, while case studies for three different VSLI platforms validate the efficacy of the introduced approaches.