USF inventors have developed a NBTI aware digital low-dropout regulator. Uni-directional shift register is employed to evenly distribute the electrical stress and mitigate the NBTI effects under arbitrary load conditions with negligible power and area overhead. It is demonstrated through simulation of an IBM POWER8 microprocessor that the proposed NBTI-aware design can achieve up to 43.2% performance improvement as compared to a conventional DLDO. These regulators find applications in the manufacturing of microprocessors, internet of things (IoT), wireless energy harvesting and aerospace engineering.
Uni-Directional Shift Register