A Fully Integrated Multi-Phase Buck Converter With On-Chip Capacitor Dynamic Re-Allocation and Fine-Grained Phase-Shedding Techniques

Abstract

This article presents a fully integrated multi-phase (MP) buck converter for on-chip power management units. A peak-and-valley differential sensing (PVDS) scheme based on a flying capacitor is proposed to evenly balance the multiple inductor currents without significant power overhead even under mismatches in inductances, parasitic series resistances, and control-signal skews among phases. In addition, dynamic re-allocation of on-chip capacitors enables an even more optimal frequency response and output ripple based on the number of activated phases. It also improves the chip area efficiency, resulting in a higher power density. The proposed DLL-based MP clock generation provides high granularity in the phase-shedding control to achieve high efficiency over a wide load range. The proposed fully integrated buck converter using six bond-wire inductors (1 nH) was fabricated in a 28-nm CMOS process. The chip running at a frequency of 400 MHz/phase can finely adjust the number of active phases by an integer step ranging from 1 to 6 through sensing a load current. A maximum power density of 1.23 W/mm2 and a peak efficiency of 83.7% were measured. This work achieved an ultra-fast dynamic voltage scaling (DVS) rate of 75 mV/ns.