Fully Integrated Power Management: The Missing Link?

The integration level of electronic systems has continually increased over the past years, leading to significant reductions in cost, size and power consumption of consumer applications. One block, however, is still mostly implemented using discrete components: the Power Management Unit. This paper analyses the benefits of monolithic power management together with the main bottlenecks, and demonstrates how the latest research efforts in system- and circuit-level techniques pave the way for their wide-spread use.status: publishe