University of South Florida

Orhun Aras Uzun

Selcuk Kose

Weize Yu

Dynamic power management techniques and voltage converter architectures are described to provide a secure and efficient on-chip power delivery system. In aspects of the embodiments, converter-gating adaptively turns on and off individual stages of an interleaved switched-capacitor voltage converter based on workload information to improve voltage conversion efficiency. Converter-gating is further utilized as a countermeasure against side channel power analysis attacks by pseudo-randomly controlling converter activity. The embodiments also improve the response time of converters during transient load changes by adaptively configuring the conversion ratio of a switched capacitor (SC) voltage converter.

Secure converter-gating, reconfiguration, and regulation

Dynamic power management techniques and voltage converter architectures are described to provide a secure and efficient on-chip power delivery system. In aspects of the embodiments, converter-gating is used to adaptively turn individual interleaved switched-capacitor stages of a voltage converter on and off based on workload information to improve voltage conversion efficiency. Further, as a countermeasure against machine learning based differential power analysis attacks, for example, control signals provided to a number of the interleaved switched-capacitor stages are delayed to reduce the risk of low power trace entropy (PTE). A higher PTE value is maintained regardless of the phase difference between an attacker's sampling rate and the operating frequency, providing an additional layer of security.

Time delayed converter reshuffling

A system and method for adaptive activity management of on-chip voltage regulators based upon the workload information is provided to force each on-chip regulator to operate in its most power-efficient load current. In the proposed regulator-gating technique, regulators are adaptively turned ON when the current demand is high and turned OFF when the current demand is low to improve the voltage conversion efficiency. With the proposed regulator-gating system and method, the overall voltage conversion efficiency from the battery or off-chip power supply to the output of the on-chip voltage regulators experiences an approximately 3 times improvement over the prior art techniques.

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Tampa, FL, United States of America

Orhun Aras Uzun