Low-power Low-dropout Regulator Research Articles

A MOSFET subdivision, MOSFET-only subthreshold voltage and current reference for LDO applications

This paper proposes a MOSFET-only voltage and current reference circuit, which can simultaneously provide a 2 V reference voltage and 300 nA reference current. This design is mainly used in a low-power Low-Dropout Regulator (LDO) project, after simulation verification, which works well in LDO applications. The circuit is performed by SMIC.18 CMOS technology and simulation with the Cadence platform, with different threshold voltage MOSFET circuit design. The whole circuit works in the subthreshold area, and the overall circuit consists of the start-up circuit, the current reference circuit, the voltage reference circuit, the MOSFET subdivision circuit, and the current mirror output circuit. The circuit has the characteristics of high precision and low power consumption, with a layout size of only 0.015 mm2. Under a temperature range of -30 to 70 °C and a power voltage of 3.3 V, the simulation and post-simulation temperature coefficients (TC) of the circuit are 5.4 ppm/°C and 19.4 ppm/°C, respectively. The post-simulation output reference voltage at room temperature is 2.0008 V, and the working power voltage within the circuit error range is 3.2 V to 3.4 V. Excluding the current mirror output circuit part of the Current-Quiescent (IQ) being 530 nA, the power consumption is 1.75 μW when the supply voltage is 3.3 V, and the design goal is reached.

A Low-Power Capacitorless LDO Regulator with Transient Enhancement Structure

In this paper, a portable low-power low dropout regulator (LDO) with no output capacitance has been designed in 0.18-[Formula: see text]m CMOS technology. In this paper, a PMOS power transistor is used and combined with an overshoot and undershoot suppression circuit to improve the transient response of the circuit. A modified Class-AB operational transconductance amplifier (OTA) is used to reduce power consumption and act as an error amplifier to eliminate low frequency poles. At the same time, a super source follower and a Miller capacitor are used for frequency compensation of the system. Finally, the system can provide a stable voltage for a load step from 0.2 to 25[Formula: see text]mA in 500[Formula: see text]ns edge-time for 140[Formula: see text]pF-load capacitance. The test results show that the circuit achieves a good voltage regulation rate and high transient response.

Small-Area Radiofrequency-Energy-Harvesting Integrated Circuits for Powering Wireless Sensor Networks.

This study presents a radiofrequency (RF)-energy-harvesting integrated circuit (IC) for powering wireless sensor networks with a wireless transmitter with an industrial, scientific, and medical (ISM) of 915 MHz. The proposed IC comprises an RF-direct current (DC) rectifier, an over-voltage protection circuit, a low-power low-dropout (LDO) voltage regulator, and a charger control circuit. In the RF-DC rectifier circuit, a six-stage Dickson voltage multiplier circuit is used to improve the received RF signal to a DC voltage by using native MOS with a small threshold voltage. The over-voltage protection circuit is used to prevent a high-voltage breakdown phenomenon from the RF front-end circuit, particularly for near-field communication. A low-power LDO regulator is designed to provide stable voltage by using zero frequency compensation and a voltage-trimming feedback. Charging current is amplified N times by using a current mirror to rapidly and stably charge a battery in the proposed charger control circuit. The obtained results revealed that the maximum power conversion efficiency of the proposed RF-energy-harvesting IC was 40.56% at an input power of −6 dBm, an output voltage of 1.5 V, and a load of 30 kΩ. A chip area of the RF-energy-harvesting IC was 0.58 × 0.49 mm2, including input/output pads, and power consumption was 42 μW.

Self-Reduction Quiescent Current Low Power Low Dropout Regulator for SoC Application

A low power low-dropout (LDO) voltage regulator with self-reduction quiescent current is proposed in this paper. This proposed capacitorless LDO for Silicon-on-Chip (SoC) application has introduced a self-adjustable low-impedance circuitry at the output of LDO to attain stability critically during low output load current (less than a few hundred of micro-ampere). When the LDO load current increases, it reduces the LDO output impedance and moved the pole towards higher frequency away from the dominant pole and improving the system stability. When this happen, less amount of quiescent current is needed for the low-impedance circuitry to sustain the low output impedance. In this proposed LDO, the quiescent current that been used to sustain the low output impedance will be self-reduced when the output load current increases. Thus, the reduction of quiescent current at low output load current has tremendously improved the efficiency. The simulation results have shown a promising stability at low load current 0~1mA. The dropout voltage for this LDO is only 100mV at 1.2V supply. The proposed LDO is validated using Silterra 0.13μm CMOS process model and designed with high efficiency at low output load current.

Capacitor-less low-dropout regulator with slew-rate-enhanced circuit

A capacitor-less low-power low-dropout regulator (LDR) with a slew-rate-enhanced circuit (SRE) was proposed. The SRE uses six transistors to constitute two comparators and two auxiliary transistors. The comparators sense the variation of load current to control one of the auxiliary transistors that generate a large current to charge or discharge the gate capacitor of the power transistor; thus SRE increases the slew-rate at the gate of the power transistor. The quiescent current of the LDR remains 18 A at the steady state because the auxiliary transistors work at the cut-off region to reduce power consumption. When load current changes between 0.1 and 100 mA, the variation of the output voltage of the LDR is improved from 675 to 300 mV.

An inner ESR-fungible compensation technique for ultra low power low dropout regulators

An inner ESR-fungible compensation technique was proposed in this paper to replace the conventional ESR compensation for low dropout regulator (LDO). This technique has been adopted in an ultra low power LDO, the quiescent current of which is only 0.9 μA and the static power consumption is less than 3 μW in typical condition. The proposed LDO can be stable enough with a small 1-μF ceramic capacitor by using this compensation technique, so it is very suitable for portable design due to the low cost and small PCB area. It has been fabricated based on a standard 0.5-μm CMOS technology, and the validity and feasibility of the proposed compensation method has been proved by the measurement results.