High - Efficiency Low - Voltage DC - DC Conversion for Portable Applications by Anthony

2 The design and measured results are reported on three prototype DC-DC converters which successfully demonstrate the design techniques of this thesis and the low-power enabling capabilities of DC-DC converters in portable applications. Voltage scaling for low-power throughput-constrained digital signal processing is reviewed and is shown to provide up to an order of magnitude power reduction compared to existing 3.3 V standards when enabled by high-efficiency low-voltage DC-DC conversion. A new ultra-low-swing I/O strategy, enabled by an ultra-low-voltage and low-power DCDC converter, is used to reduce the power of high-speed inter-chip communication by greater than two orders of magnitude. Dynamic voltage scaling is proposed to dynamically trade general-purpose processor throughput for energy-efficiency, yielding up to an order of magnitude improvement in the average energy per operation of the processor. This is made possible by a new class of voltage converter, called the dynamic DC-DC converter, whose primary performance objectives and design considerations are introduced in this thesis. Robert W. Brodersen, Chairman of Committee Table of