In an effort to keep power consumption reasonable and maintain constant power dissipation, chipmakers have been moving their circuits to lower-voltage requirements, which these days are about 1 volt. But supplying such low voltage to a chip from an off-chip source requires increasing the input current to more than 100 amperes per microprocessor. Carrying such high currents around the chip on copper interconnects leads to high conductive power losses. It also means that the majority of input/output pins—as many as 70 percent—must be devoted to power distribution, leaving few available for transmitting actual data.
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