Intellectual Merit: With the diminishing returns of technology scaling in terms of reducing power consumption in highly integrated systems, researchers are moving towards dividing the system into many sub-components and dynamically adapting their power supplies to their exact demand at any given time. For this to be effective there is a need to implement numerous highly-efficient power supplies with minimal cost and footprint. These power supplies must feature wide bandwidth to enable dynamic demand-based operation. The goal of this research is to develop new power supply architectures that are capable of efficiently generating large number of power domains with over 500MHz bandwidth using only integrated capacitors and a single shared inductor. This will be accomplished by adopting a single-step power conversion approach to avoid efficiency degradation due to cascaded power converters, and implementing the large number of power domains by proposing a Multi-Frequency Single-Inductor-Multiple-Output power converter topology. In this new topology, the rate of energy switching from the main energy source is decoupled from the rate of energy distribution to the multiple outputs, and therefore, the output bandwidth becomes no longer limited by low frequency switching at the input side. By using high frequency energy distribution to the outputs, very fast transient response can be achieved and the output capacitors required can be scaled-down and integrated on-chip, thus limiting off-chip components to a single inductor. Broader Impact: The proposed research focuses on the critical area of power conversion and distribution in highly integrated systems in response to the growing demand for energy-efficient, cost-effective, and small footprint solutions. The proposed power conversion topology will overcome the fundamental challenge of implementing a large number of power supplies while also preserving high efficiency, achieving wide bandwidth, and small footprint and cost. This will enable high speed dynamic adaptation of power supplies, which will significantly reduce power consumption in highly integrated systems. The ability to do that will be transformational not only for battery-operated devices, but also in non-battery-operated ones where heat dissipation is critical. The educational component of the proposed project will help contribute to filling a serious gap in electrical engineering education in the US, where integrated power supply design is neither covered under traditional power electronics, nor integrated circuits curriculums. The proposed outreach activities in collaboration with the University of Texas-Pan American involving Hispanic students will further contribute to improving participation by minority groups in the field of science and engineering.
