A low voltage and low ground current low-dropout regulator with transient enhanced circuit for SoC

The design of a low voltage and low ground current low-dropout voltage regulator (LDO) with transient enhanced circuit (TEC) for system-on-ship (SoC) application was presented. The TEC consists of the two comparator and two auxiliary transistors. The comparators sense the variation of load current; moreover, it can control the auxiliary transistors to push or pull the gate voltage of power transistor to achieve fast transient. On the other hand, the auxiliary transistors work in cut-off region to reduce the power consume in the stable state. Therefore, the proposed LDO achieves low ground current and fast transient function. In addition, the minimum output-current required down to 100 μA by Q-reduction technique. The 1 V capacitor-less LDO voltage regulator with a power supply of 1.2 V was fabricated in 0.35 μm CMOS technology, consuming only 18 μA of ground current with a dropout voltage of 200 mV.