Dynamic Power Management with Power Network-on-Chip

A critical challenge in multifunctional heterogeneous systems-on-chip is delivering high quality dynamically controlled power to support power efficient and portable systems. Efficiently providing multiple point-of-load on-chip voltages requires fundamental changes to the power delivery and management process. The concept of a power network on-chip (PNoC) is introduced here as a general scalable platform for delivering and managing power. This network provides enhanced power control and real-time management of resource sharing for systematic and scalable management of the power delivery process in heterogeneous integrated circuits. To evaluate the performance of the proposed power delivery and management system, a PNoC with four power routers is investigated which supplies power to four power domains. The behavior of the individual power domains is modeled with IBM power grid benchmarks. The proposed architecture and circuits for sensing, routing, and dynamic control of the on-chip power are described. The built-in modularity of the PNoC is exploited to apply dynamic voltage scaling, illustrating the scalability of the PNoC platform while exhibiting power savings of up to 32%.