Resonant gate drive for silicon integrated DC/DC converters

Many studies concern high-switching frequency, monolithic DC/DC converters in the 1-W range for battery-powered handsets (up to 5 V-input voltage). The major limitation in the design of hard-switching, high-frequency DC/DC SMPSs comes from the increased switching losses in the 100 MHz range of switching frequency. The contribution of a robust resonant gate driver is considered for the reduction of the power MOSFET gate switching losses for a 200 MHz switching frequency SMPS. Simulation results show a reasonable reduction of 20 to 30% in switching losses with respect to a standard optimized gate driver and for an acceptable silicon area impact. The SMPS power losses could be reduced by 5% with an acceptable impact on silicon area. A prototype has been designed in 0.25-mum BiCMOS technology.