Managing the power consumption of ICs is an increasingly difficult challenge, because each new generation of portable device includes expanded features and demands longer battery lives.

Buck regulators are usually the first choice when you design nonisolated step-down regulators unless the ratio of V IN to V OUT is greater than 10, the input voltage is high, or both. Low duty cycle ...

Wire delay is beginning to dominate gate delay in current CMOS technologies. According to Moore’s Law by 2016 CMOS feature size should be on the order of 22 nm with clock frequencies reaching around ...

Power supplies that use diodes to rectify an ac voltage to obtain a dc voltage must deal with inherent inefficiencies. A standard diode or ultra-fast diode can have a 1-V forward voltage or higher at ...

The synchronous buck converter is a widely used topology in low-voltage, high-current applications. One common application is a point-of-load (POL) converter that transforms a system bus voltage of 48 ...

Given the growing importance and impact of portable, battery-operated devices in today’s society, it’s easy to understand why power consumption has become such a critical factor in IC design. But it’s ...

An asynchronous DSP offers better power, performance, and reliability than one based on standard synchronous logic. It also enables simpler and less expensive PCB and power supplies. Until today, the ...

There are a number of interesting technologies to keep an eye on in term of how and when they could be adopted for use in SoC design today, some of which include gallium arsenide, GPGPUs, 3D ICs and ...