Grant: Idea to Innovation

The project will develop the technologies to improve the dynamic performance of the voltage regulator (VR) used to power the computer central processing unit (CPU) and graphic processing unit (GPU). At present, the standard VR uses a control method called voltage mode control to regulate the CPU voltage. It is well known that the CPU current changes very quickly from sleeping mode to full processing mode, and during the transient condition the voltage must be regulated within a very tight range. If the voltage deviates outside the specified range, the computer will crash. Under voltage mode control, a large capacitor bank is needed to hold the voltage within the specified range. This results in the VR requiring a large area in the motherboard, and increases associated manufacturing costs. A new technology, called charge balance control (CBC) has been developed by the applicant that can significantly improve the dynamic performance of the VR and consequently can reduce its size by approximately 25% and the cost by around 10%. In this project the CBC technology will be used to build a demonstration voltage regulator prototype for a CPU application. It is expected that the success of the project will pave the way to design a VR integrated circuit to control the next generation CPU producing a smaller, more reliable, yet less expensive computer.