VDD-Hopping Accelerator for On-Chip Power Supplies Achieving Nano-Second Order Transient Time

A V_DD-hopping accelerator for on-chip power supply circuits is proposed and the effectiveness of the accelerator circuit is experimentally verified. The circuit enables nano-second order transient time in on-chip distributed power supply systems. The measured transition time is less than 5ns with load circuit equivalent to 25k logic gates in 0.18-mum CMOS. This is to be compared with the case without the accelerator of the order of mus and thus the acceleration by two orders of magnitude is achieved. Automatic generation of the timings in a self-aligned manner is also discussed