An Off-Chip Capacitor Free Low Dropout Regulator with PSR Enhancement at Higher Frequencies

Low Dropout Regulators (LDOs) are extensively used in portable applications like mobile phones, PDAs and notebooks. These portable applications demand high power efficiency and low output voltage ripple. In addition to these, the radio circuits in these applications demand high power supply rejection (PSR). The output voltage of a conventional DC/DC converter (generally switched mode) has considerable ripple which feeds as input to these LDOs. And the challenge is to suppress these ripples for wide range of frequencies (for radio units) to provide clean supply. Enhanced buffer based compensation is proposed for the fully on-chip CMOS LDO which stabilizes the loop for different load conditions as well as improve the power supply rejection (PSR) until frequencies closer to open loop‟s unity-gain frequency. The stability and PSR are totally valid even for load capacitor varying from 0 to 100 pF. The proposed capacitor-less LDO is fabricated in On-Semi 0.5 μm fully CMOS process. Experimental results confirm a PSR of -30 dB till 420 KHz for the maximum load current of 50mA. The load transients of the chip shows transient glitches less than 90 mV independent of output capacitance