Power delivery modeling for full switching voltage regulator on high performance computing system

High performance computing (HPC) platform power delivery simulation is typically based on state average mode for simplicity. However, it is not able to capture the dynamic ripple noise and non-linear effect of output voltages, as well as the phase information. The correlation between state average model and lab measurement often lacks accuracy in low to middle frequency range. As a result, platform level power delivery performance assessment has to rely on hands-on measurements to fine-tune the board in order to meet platform specifications, which poses a stringent challenge to product readiness and development cost. To alleviate this problem, single shot design with accurate predictive switching VR modeling to achieve performance and cost balance has been identified as the goal. In this paper, we demonstrated a switching VR modeling methodology with accurate correlation and prediction results using On Semi voltage regulator (VR) model and Intel Romley platform customer reference board (CRB). This methodology applies to other platform simulation with different VRs and motherboards, and can be proliferated to external customers to improve their product design.