A 10 nA Ultra-Low Quiescent Current and 60 ns Fast Transient Response Low-Dropout Regulator for Internet-of-Things
Jia-Rui Huang, Yong-Hwa Wen, Tzu-Hsien Yang, Jia-Jyun Lee, Guan‐Ting Liu, Ke‐Horng Chen, Ying-Hsi Lin, Shian-Ru Lin, Tsung‐Yen Tsai
Abstract
Ultra-low quiescent current (<inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$I_{Q}$ </tex-math></inline-formula>) low-dropout regulator is the only solution for compact size Internet of Things (IoT) electronic devices. This paper presents an ultra-low <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$I_{Q}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> low dropout regulator, including low <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$I_{Q}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> error amplifier (EA) compensated by the adaptive current control (ACC), low leakage feedback network, low <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$I_{Q}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> current comparator, analog transient enhancement (ATE), and digital transient enhancement (DTE). The chip was fabricated in a standard <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$0.5~\mu \text{m}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> CMOS process. Measurement results show the current peak efficiency of the LDO is as high as 99.99%. Besides, owing to ATE and DTE circuits, when the load current changes from 1mA to 50mA with a 10 ns edge time, the measured undershoot and overshoot voltages are 75 mV and 50 mV, respectively, with the recovery time (<inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$T_{R}$ </tex-math></inline-formula>) of 60 ns and 80 ns, respectively, where the best 0.003 ps FoM is achieved.