Columbia University and Semiconductor Research Corporation Breathe New Life into Scalability by Integrating Voltage Regulators Directly onto ICs

This article is from Market Watch The Wall Street Journal

Semiconductor Research Corporation (SRC), the world's leading university-research consortium for semiconductors and related technologies, and Columbia University today announced research results that place industry focus back onto voltage regulators as a solution for continued processor scalability. Having just proven a new generation of integrated voltage regulator (IVR) that features energy densities more than ten times that of present state-of-art inductors available on computer chips, the team is preparing to test a second round of prototypes.

The research team is working to solve an industry predicament where the increasing use of parallel multicore processors that enable scaling of microprocessor systems means that many different supply voltages are becoming necessary on modern computer chips. External board-mounted voltage regulators have not kept up with these scaling demands.