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UM E-Theses Collection (澳門大學電子學位論文庫)

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Title

Efficient power management circuit techniques

English Abstract

Power management integrated circuits (PMICs) are crucial components in electronic devices. Among which, DC-DC converters and low-dropout regulators (LDOs) are widely used in battery-powered applications. DC-DC converters feature high efficiency and large load current capability; however, they suffer from large voltage ripple and slow transient response. Therefore, LDOs, including digital LDO (DLDO) and analog LDO (ALDO), are widely used for point-of-load applications. Therefore, DC-DC and LDO cascade structure is a common solution for the power delivery network on board or on chip. This thesis can be divided into two parts, covering both the DC-DC and LDO designs. DC-DC converters can be categorized into two types: inductive DC-DC converter, e.g., buck converter, boost converter and buck-boost converter; or capacitive DC-DC converter e.g., switched-capacitor (SC). In recent years, hybrid DC-DC converters that consist of both inductor and capacitor have attracted much attention for their superior over traditional inductive and capacitive DC-DC converters. In this thesis, we proposed a hybrid switched-capacitor (SC)-parallel-inductor buck (CPL-Buck) converter with reduced inductor current IL. The proposed CPL-Buck converter reduces the voltage stress on the inductor by a series-connected flying capacitors C(F1) in phase 1 and reduces the current stress by a parallel-connected SC in both phase 1 and phase 2. Therefore, it effectively reduces the current ripple as well as the average current of IL, making it possible to use a small volume inductor to deliver large output current IOUT. Measurement results show that, for 1.2A maximum I(OUT), 3-4.2V input to 0.6-1V output, the proposed CPL-Buck obtains a peak efficiency of 92.9% and a peak current density of 0.3A/mm^2 with a power inductor as small as 1.6×0.8×0.8mm^3. Then, a fully integrated DLDO with adaptive current step size control is proposed for near/subthreshold voltage digital circuits. By dividing the main power PMOSs into ten blocks with different unit-cell sizes, the proposed DLDO can turn-on/-off small power PMOSs in light load and large ones in heavy load conditions. High regulation accuracy in a wide load range and fast transient response are hence achieved. The measured undershoot and overshoot voltages are only 53 and 37 mV, respectively, when the load current changes between 0 and 100 mA. To supply the noise-sensitive circuits, we presents a fully integrated flipped voltage follower (FVF) based LDO regulator with enhanced full-spectrum power supply rejection (PSR). We firstly studied three types of FVF LDO’s PSR performances, then we proposed a novel FVF LDO with a low-gain fast loop-1 for full spectrum PSR and a high-gain slow loop-2 to enhance the low frequency PSR. What’s more, we used dynamic compensation to push loop-2’s unit gain bandwidth (UGB) to higher frequency, thus further improved the PSR in ten of kHz to tens of MHz range. Measurement results show that the circuit achieves a low frequency PSR of –58 dB with the worst full-spectrum PSR of –9 dB in 20mA ILOAD with a 300 pF on-chip output capacitor. Further, with an UGB over 400 MHz, the proposed FVF LDO reaches 0.9 ns response time.

Issue date

2022.

Author

Cai, Gui Gang

Faculty

Faculty of Science and Technology

Department

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

Degree

Ph.D.

Subject

Low voltage integrated circuits

Electric power -- Conservation

Supervisor

Lu, Yan

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Full-text (Intranet only)

Location
1/F Zone C
Library URL
991010069817906306