The Magnets Under the Icy Lake

The mechanism at the very heart of the semiconductor industry is the self-fulfilling prophecy we call Moore's Law. The relentless pursuit of smaller, more efficient transistors has enabled decades of chip improvements through higher integration and smarter, more complex designs. But the compaction of transistors and smaller footprints for any given component on the silicon is not without its share of problems. In fact, for certain aspects of chip design such as power delivery, the ever-shrinking silicon presents real challenges. That's exactly what happened to the Intel power delivery engineers as they were working on their next-generation voltage regulator that founds its way to recent Ice Lake and Tiger Lake mobile processors.