Robust power gating reactivation by dynamic wakeup sequence throttling

Abstract

The wakeup sequence for power gating techniques has become an important issue as the rush current typically causes a high voltage drop. This paper proposes a new wakeup scheme utilizing an on-chip detector which continuously monitors the power supply noise in real time. Therefore, this scheme is able to dynamically throttle the wakeup sequence according to ambient voltage level. As a result, even the adjacent active circuit blocks induce an unexpectedly high voltage drop, the possibility of the occurrence of excessive voltage drop is reduced significantly.