ABSTRACT
Efficient voltage regulation and conversion are essential mechanisms in modern integrated circuit design process due to power management and heterogeneous computing. This chapter summarizes opportunities provided by monolithic voltage regulation and related challenges. It provides a broad overview of primary voltage regulator topologies with emphasis on low-dropout regulators, switched-capacitor-based regulators, and switching buck regulators. The chapter describes a fully monolithic hybrid regulator topology with application to low-voltage systems such as near-threshold computing. In off-chip regulators, the parasitic impedances of the interconnect among the devices, pads, and package dissipate significant energy, thereby reducing the overall efficiency of a regulator. Integrating a voltage regulator with the load circuit can potentially reduce these parasitic losses since the interconnect length is significantly shorter. Traditional trade-offs in regulator design are exacerbated when all the components are required to be on-chip.
