A Fully Integrated Buck Regulator With 2-GHz Resonant Switching for Low-Power Applications

Abstract

This paper presents a fully integrated buck regulator design for low-power applications. In order to enable the usage of on-chip inductor for low load current 10–40 mA, the proposed buck regulator is designed with an ultra-high switching frequency at 2 GHz, which is the highest switching frequency reported so far. To reduce the power switch losses, resonant switching scheme is utilized to save the switching clock energy. Tunable slew rate recovery circuits are used to improve the efficiency of the design. The proposed buck regulator has been implemented in 65-nm CMOS technology with a 1.1-V input. Measurement shows a wide output range of 0.3–0.86 V. The proposed design achieves up to 73% power efficiency.