Implementation of the programmable low power DC-DC voltage converter by FPGA

This paper proposes a programmable dynamic voltage scaled DC-DC buck converter for integrated circuits (ICs). The proposed voltage converter does not need the band-gap voltage reference to generate a desired voltage for circuit loads. Therefore, the output voltage of the converter could be assigned by any voltage level for ICs without considering the effects of the CMOS stack limit and IC processing drift. The control unit of the proposed converter is realized by a floating-point digital compensator on a FPGA. Lab experiments show that the proposed converter can supply stable voltage levels at 1.8 V, 2.7 V and 3.3 V with variant input voltage ranging from 5 V-8 V. The load current could be supplied up to 2.5 A.