Control and stability analysis for the Vdd-hopping mechanism

In low-power electronics, achieving a high energy efficiency has great relevance. Nowadays, global asynchronous local synchronous systems enables to use a local dynamic voltage scaling architecture. This technique allows to reach a high energy efficiency. Moreover, local dynamic voltage scaling can be implemented using different approaches. One of them is the Vdd-hopping technique. In this paper, we propose an innovative control approach which aims for minimizing the energy dissipated during the Vdd-hopping transients. In addition, our control also includes the ability to limit the current peaks during such transients. Stability of the closed-loop system is analyzed. A discrete version of this controller is obtained, which coincides with energy-aware control (ENARC) that is patent pending. And a comparison of this last one with another published is done.