A study of load-line effect on power supplies of digital networking processors

Digital networking processor power supplies typically have voltage sense points at die level so that the die level voltages are regulated and kept at constant DC levels. In this paper, we studied the load-line effect on the power supplies by simulations and lab measurements. We found that the total dissipated power for digital networking processors can be reduced by the introduction of the load-line effect in the regulation loop. The thermal design point of the system could be relaxed by introducing load-line operation without compromising the performance of these processors.