Early-Stage Planning of Switched-Capacitor Converters in a Heterogeneous Chip

The switched-capacitor converter (SCC) has been widely used for voltage regulation in multicore chips, where energy efficiency is the major concern. However as the overhead to integrate SCCs in a chip is non-negligible, the SCCs could not be overused. Hence in this paper we propose an early stage SCCs planning framework to obtain the SCC supply scheme together with the optimized Metal-Insulator-Metal (MIM) capacitance allocation and converter ratio selection for each SCC when the given number of SCCs is less than the number of cores . Besides, our method could also explore to find the best number of used SCCs for a given chip. The experiments show the results of our SCC planning methods.