Nxp B.v.

Meng Hao

Kevin Mahooti

Rui Yang

Andre Gunther

He Bo

Johnny Chuang-Li Lee

Tian Jie Feng

Consistent with an example embodiment, there is a power regulator arrangement with variable current capacity providing power from a power supply to a load having variable demand. As a load, a high-performance microprocessor has several modes of operation. At the highest speed setting, it demands a lot of current. At slower clock speeds and during state retention, the processor has a very low current consumption. Using a single regulator, the current efficiency may be very low during long standby periods. To increase the efficiency even at lower load currents, a scheme is based on parallel operation of multiple regulators having different load ranges, for example, a 'low, 'medium,' and &#x201c;high' range regulators. Having knowledge of the load current profile, the regulators can be adjusted such that the peak of the efficiency curve matches the load profile of the regulator. The efficiency of the power regulator arrangement is enhanced throughout the range of power demanded by the load.

Standby current reduction through a switching arrangement with multiple regulators

A controller receives an M-bit input and generates, in response, an S-bit upper range binary data feeding S-bit high range DAC and an R-bit lower range data feeding an R-bit low range DAC. The controller detects transition points in the M-bit input and in response, adds a transition data to the S-bit data equal to at least one least significant bit of the S-bit data and subtracts a value from the R-bit data equal to the transition data. The transition points and the transition data are detected and added at points avoiding such transitions at a full scale value of the R-bit data.

High resolution overlapping bit segmented DAC

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Shanghai, China

Meng Hao