Integrated Power Supply Design – Its Time to Work with the Load

In order to meet the demand for processing performance required in electronic devices, parallelism have been used to increase throughput within a strict power constraint. As parallelism increases the number of cores integrated onto a chip, there are increasing need and benefit to utilizing an independent power supply for each core in order to optimize total chip power and circuit performance. Simply adding off-chip supplies will not only incur significant degradation of supply impedance due to split package power planes and a limited number of pins, but also additional cost due to increased motherboard size and package complexity.
To address these challenges, fully integrated power converters appeared to be the ultimate solution. I will present our design methodology and techniques for the switched-capacitor approach to achieve high power density, high efficiency and sub-ns transient response using standard CMOS processes. A new architecture of fully integrated hybrid converter will also be introduced.
At the end of the talk, I will discuss how integrated power supply can be designed to improve future system efficiency and performance in many applications ranging from building power distributions to the Internet of Things and implantable devices.

Hanh-Phuc Le is currently working as the Chief Technology Officer at Lion Semiconductor Inc., a startup that he co-founded in 2012. He received the B.S. (2003), M.S. (2006), and Ph.D (2013) degrees in Electrical Engineering from Hanoi University of Technology, Vietnam, KAIST, Korea, and UC Berkeley, California, respectively.
He has held R&D and consulting positions at the Institute of Material Science, the Vietnam Academy of Science and Technology, JDA Tech in Korea, Sun MicroSystems, Intel and Rambus. His interests include integrated power electronics, with emphasis on high-speed switch-mode power converters, fully integrated conversion, control methodology and energy-efficient mix-signal integrated circuits.
Dr. Le received the 2013 Sevin Rosen Funds Award for Innovation, the IEEE Solid-State Circuits Society Predoctoral Achievement Award 2012-2013, and the 1st Place Award in Clean & Sustainable Energy Alternatives at the 2013 Big Ideal @ Berkeley