YOU'VE PROBABLY PLAYED hundreds, maybe thousands, of videos on your smartphone. But have you ever thought about what happens when you press “play”? · The instant you touch that little triangle, many things happen at once. In microseconds, idle compute cores on your phone's processor spring to life. As they do so, their voltages and clock frequencies shoot up to ensure that the video decompresses and displays without delay. Meanwhile, other cores, running tasks in the background, throttle down. Charge surges into the active cores' millions of transistors and slows to a trickle in the newly idled ones. · This dance, called dynamic voltage and frequency scaling (DVFS), happens continually in the processor, called a system-on-chip (SoC), that runs your phone and your laptop as well as in the servers that back them. It's all done in an effort to balance computational performance with power consumption, something that's particularly challenging for smartphones. The circuits that orchestrate DVFS strive to ensure a steady clock and a rock-solid voltage level despite the surges in current, but they are also among the most backbreaking to design.

中文翻译：

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延长电池寿命的电路：全数字版本的低压降稳压器将节省时间、金钱和电力


您可能已经在智能手机上播放了数百个甚至数千个视频。但你有没有想过当你按下“播放”时会发生什么？ · 当你触摸那个小三角形的那一刻，很多事情同时发生。在几微秒之内，手机处理器上的空闲计算核心就会启动。当它们这样做时，它们的电压和时钟频率会飙升，以确保视频解压和显示没有延迟。与此同时，其他在后台运行任务的核心也会减慢速度。电荷涌入活动核心的数百万个晶体管，并在新闲置的晶体管中减慢至涓流。 · 这种称为动态电压和频率调节 (DVFS) 的舞蹈在称为片上系统 (SoC) 的处理器中不断发生，该处理器运行您的手机和笔记本电脑以及支持它们的服务器。这一切都是为了平衡计算性能和功耗，这对于智能手机来说尤其具有挑战性。尽管电流激增，协调 DVFS 的电路仍努力确保稳定的时钟和坚如磐石的电压水平，但它们也是最繁琐的设计之一。