A monolithic buck DC-DC converter with on-chip PWM circuit

A monolithic CMOS voltage-mode, buck DC-DC converter with integrated power switches and new on-chip pulse-width modulation (PWM) technique of switching control is presented in this paper. The PWM scheme is constructed by a CMOS ring oscillator, which duty is compensated by a pseudo hyperbola curve current generator to achieve almost constant frequency operation. The minimum operating voltage of this voltage-mode buck DC-DC converter is 1.2V. The proposed buck DC-DC converter with a chip area of 0.82mm^2 is fabricated with a standard 0.35-@mm CMOS process. The experimental results show that the converter is well regulated over an output range from 0.3 to 1.2V, with an input voltage of 1.5V. The maximum efficiency of the converter is 88%, and its efficiency is kept above 80% over an output power ranging from 30 to 300mW.

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