Abstract
There has been a tremendous research effort in recent years to move DC-DC converters on chip for enhanced performance. However, a major limiting factor to implementing on-chip inductive DC-DC converters is the large area overhead induced by spiral inductors. Thus, we propose using through-silicon-vias (TSVs), a critical enabling technique in three-dimensional (3D) integrated systems, to implement on-chip inductors for DC-DC converters. While existing literature show that TSV inductors are inferior compared with conventional spiral inductors due to substrate loss for RF applications, in this article, we demonstrate that it is not the case for DC-DC converters, which operate at relatively low frequencies. Experimental results show that by replacing conventional spiral inductors with TSV inductors, with almost the same efficiency and output voltage, up to 4.3x and 3.2x inductor area reduction can be achieved for the single-phase buck converter and the interleaved buck converter with magnetic coupling, respectively.
Recommended Citation
U. R. Tida et al., "Novel through-silicon-via Inductor-Based On-chip DC-DC Converter Designs in 3D ICS," ACM Journal on Emerging Technologies in Computing Systems, vol. 11, no. 2, article no. A16, Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), Oct 2014.
The definitive version is available at https://doi.org/10.1145/2637481
Department(s)
Electrical and Computer Engineering
Keywords and Phrases
3D ICs; DC-DC converter; TSV inductor
International Standard Serial Number (ISSN)
1550-4840; 1550-4832
Document Type
Article - Journal
Document Version
Citation
File Type
text
Language(s)
English
Rights
© 2024 Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), All rights reserved.
Publication Date
01 Oct 2014
