Power management unit (PMU) is commonly used to manage power modules to achieve high efficient performance for integrated circuits. Inside the PMU, controllers that belong to different power modules could be pretty much similar. If the discrete feature of the digital control can be gainfully arranged, we can use only one controller to operate all the power modules inside the PMU, which can reduce circuit area and save cost. This article proposes a pipeline concept to realize this idea. To achieve high performance, this article also introduces a phase sequence interchange technique to reduce the cross regulation problem of the single inductor dual outputs converter and an autotuning charge balance algorithm (AT-CBA) to enhance the transient response. The PMU is fabricated in Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) 0.18 μm CMOS manufacturing process for functional validation. Experimental results show that the pipeline controlled PMU can simultaneously output six voltages with extremely low cross regulation. The proposed AT-CBA also successfully make both buck converter and low-dropout achieve near-optimal transient response in 40 mV/5 μs and 120 mV/1 μs, respectively.

中文翻译：

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面积高效的高性能数控电源管理单元


电源管理单元（PMU）通常用于管理电源模块，以实现集成电路的高效性能。在 PMU 内部，属于不同电源模块的控制器可能非常相似。如果能够充分发挥数字控制的离散特性，我们可以只用一个控制器来操作PMU内部的所有功率模块，这样可以减少电路面积并节省成本。本文提出了管道概念来实现这一想法。为了实现高性能，本文还引入了相序互换技术来减少单电感双输出转换器的交叉调节问题，以及自动调谐电荷平衡算法（AT-CBA）来增强瞬态响应。 PMU 采用台积电 (TSMC) 0.18 μm CMOS 制造工艺制造，用于功能验证。实验结果表明，流水线控制的PMU可以同时输出6个电压，且交叉调节极低。所提出的 AT-CBA 还成功地使降压转换器和低压降分别在 40 mV/5 μs 和 120 mV/1 μs 内实现接近最佳的瞬态响应。