Current shaping and multi-thread activation for fast and reliable power mode transition in multicore designs

Power gating has been widely adopted in multicore designs. The design of fast and reliable power mode transition for per-core power gating remains a challenging problem. This paper studies the design methodology for fast power gating wake-up with guaranteed power integrity. Two novel techniques, namely current shaping and multi-thread activation are proposed. Models and physical implementation of both techniques are analyzed. Experimental results demonstrated 1.5 to 11 times wake-up time speedup with no penalty on area or power consumptions by using the proposed techniques.