• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SD
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• v.49 no.6
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• pp.1-8
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• 2012

This paper presents a fully-integrated buck converter equipped with packaging inductors. These inductors include parasitic inductances of the bonding wires and lead frames in the package. They have significantly better Q factors than the best on-chip inductors implemented on silicon. This paper also proposes a low-swing gate driver for efficient regulation of high-frequency switching converters. The low-swing driver uses the voltage drop of a diode-connect transistor. The proposed converter is designed and fabricated using a $0.13-{\mu}m$ CMOS process. The fully-integrated buck converter achieves 68.7% and 86.6% efficiency for 3.3 V/2.0 V and 2.8 V/2.3 V conversions, respectively.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Industry Convergence
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• v.21 no.6
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• pp.265-271
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• 2018

DC-DC buck converter is a critical building block in the power management integrated circuit (PMIC) architecture for the portable devices such as cellular phone, personal digital assistance (PDA) because of its power efficiency over a wide range of conversion ratio. To ensure a safe operation, avoid unexpected damages and enhance the reliability of the converter, fully-integrated protection circuits such as over voltage protection (OVP), under voltage lock out (UVLO), startup, and thermal shutdown (TSD) blocks are designed. In this paper, these three fully-integrated protection circuit blocks are proposed for use in the DC-DC buck converter. The buck converter with proposed protection blocks is operated with a switching frequency of 1 MHz in continuous conduction mode (CCM). In order to verify the proposed scheme, the buck converter has been designed using a 180 nm CMOS technology. The UVLO circuit is designed to track the input voltage and turns on/off the buck converter when the input voltage is higher/lower than 2.6 V, respectively. The OVP circuit blocks the buck converter's operation when the input voltage is over 3.3 V, thereby preventing the destruction of the devices inside the controller IC. The TSD circuit shuts down the converter's operation when the temperature is over $85^{\circ}C$. In order to verify the proposed scheme, these protection circuits were firstly verified through the simulation in SPICE. The proposed protection circuits were then fabricated and the measured results showed a good matching with the simulation results.

• Proceedings of the Korean Institute of Electrical and Electronic Material Engineers Conference
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• 2009.11a
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• pp.71-71
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• 2009

This paper describes a simple, on-chip CMOS compatible the thin-film inductor applied for the dc-dc converters. A fully CMOS-compatible thin-film inductor with a bottom NiFe core is integrated with the DC-DC converter circuit on the same chip. By eliminating ineffective top magnetic layer, very simple process integration was achieved. Fabricated monolithic thin film inductor showed fairly high inductance of 2.2 ${\mu}H$ and Q factor of 11.2 at 5MHz. When the DC-DC converter operated at $V_{in}=3.3V$ and 5MHz frequency, it showed output voltage $V_{out}=8.0V$, and corresponding power efficiency was 85%.

• ETRI Journal
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• v.25 no.4
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• pp.270-273
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• 2003

This paper presents a simple process to integrate thin-film inductors with a bottom NiFe magnetic core. NiFe thin films with a thickness of 2 to 3${\mu}m$ were deposited by sputtering. A polyimide buffer layer and shadow mask were used to relax the stress of the NiFe films. The fabricated double spiral thin-film inductor showed an inductance of 0.49${\mu}H$ and a Q factor of 4.8 at 8 MHz. The DC-DC converter with the monolithically integrated thin-film inductor showed comparable performances to those with sandwiched magnetic layers. We simplified the integration process by eliminating the planarization process for the top magnetic core. The efficiency of the DC-DC converter with the monolithic thin-film inductor was 72% when the input voltage and output voltage were 3.5 V and 6 V, respectively, at an operating frequency of 8 MHz.

• Transactions on Electrical and Electronic Materials
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• v.11 no.1
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• pp.24-28
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• 2010

A simulation study of a current-mode direct current (DC)-DC buck converter is presented in this paper. The converter, with a fully integrated power module, is implemented by using sense method metal-oxide-semiconductor field-effect transistor (MOSFET) and bipolar complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (BiCMOS) technology. When the MOSFET is used in a current sensor, the sensed inductor current with an internal ramp signal can be used for feedback control. In addition, the BiCMOS technology is applied in the converter for an accurate current sensing and a low power consumption. The DC-DC converter is designed using the standard $0.35\;{\mu}m$ CMOS process. An off-chip LC filter is designed with an inductance of 1 mH and a capacitance of 12.5 nF. The simulation results show that the error between the sensing signal and the inductor current can be controlled to be within 3%. The characteristics of the error amplification and output ripple are much improved, as compared to converters using conventional CMOS circuits.

• Journal of the Korean Institute of Electrical and Electronic Material Engineers
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• v.16 no.2
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• pp.138-143
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• 2003

A double spiral thin-film inductor with a NiFe magnetic core is integrated with DC-DC converter IC. The NiFe core is deposited on a polyimide film as the thinckness of NiFe is 2.5~3.5 ${\mu}$m. Then, copper conductor line is deposited on the NiFe core with double spiral structure. Process integration is performed by sequential processes of etching the polyimide film deposited both top and bottom of the NiFe core and electroplation copper conductor line from exposed metal pad of the DC-DC converter IC. Process integration is simplified by elimination planarization process for top core because the proposed thin-film inductor has a bottom NiFe core only. Inductor of the fabricated monolithic DC-DC converter IC is 0.53 ${\mu}$H when the area of converter IC and thin-film inductor are 5X5$\textrm{mm}^2$ and 3.5X2.5$\textrm{mm}^2$, respectively. The efficiency is 72% when input voltage and output voltage are 3.5 V and 6 V, respectively at the operation frequency of 8 MHz.

• Transactions on Electrical and Electronic Materials
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• v.12 no.6
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• pp.262-266
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• 2011

A simulation study of a current-mode direct current (DC)-DC boost converter is presented in this paper. This converter, with a fully-integrated power module, is implemented by using bipolar complementary metal-oxide semiconductor (BiCMOS) technology. The current-sensing circuit has an op-amp to achieve high accuracy. With the sense metal-oxide semiconductor field-effect transistor (MOSFET) in the current sensor, the sensed inductor current with the internal ramp signal can be used for feedback control. In addition, BiCMOS technology is applied to the converter, for accurate current sensing and low power consumption. The DC-DC converter is designed with a standard 0.35 ${\mu}m$ BiCMOS process. The off-chip inductor-capacitor (LC) filter is operated with an inductance of 1 mH and a capacitance of 12.5 nF. Simulation results show the high performance of the current-sensing circuit and the validity of the BiCMOS converter. The output voltage is found to be 4.1 V with a ripple ratio of 1.5% at the duty ratio of 0.3. The sensing current is measured to be within 1 mA and follows to fit the order of the aspect ratio, between sensing and power FET.

• Journal of the Korea Academia-Industrial cooperation Society
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• v.17 no.7
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• pp.42-48
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• 2016

In this paper, a high-precision peak detector circuit that detects the output voltage information of a fly-back converter is proposed. The proposed design consists of basic analog elements with only one operational amplifier and three transistors. Because of its simple structure, the proposed circuit can minimize the delay time of the detection process, which has a strong impact on the precision of the regulation aspect of the fly-back converter. Furthermore, by using an amplifier and several transistors, the proposed detector can be fully integrated on-chip, instead of using discrete circuit elements, such as capacitors and diodes, as in conventional designs, which reduces the production cost of the fly-back converter module. In order to verify the performance of the proposed scheme, the peak detector was simulated and implemented by using a 0.35 m MagnaChip process. The gained results from the simulation with a sinusoidal stimulus signal show a very small detection error in the range of 0.3~3.1%, which is much lower than other reported detecting circuits. The measured results from the fabricated chip confirm the simulation results. As a result, the proposed peak detector is recommended for designs of high-performance fly-back converters in order to improve the poor regulation aspect seen in conventional designs.

• Journal of Power Electronics
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• v.10 no.6
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• pp.611-620
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• 2010

This paper presents a new architecture, called "Power Electronics Remote Wiring and Measurement Laboratory (PermLAB)", that translates a common gateway interface (CGI) string from a remote web user to a web server connected to a 3-dimension switching matrix board, can be used to switch on and off, and to control a cluster of instruments and components. PermLAB addresses real-time connection, switching, and data acquisition over the Internet instead of using simulated data. A software procedure uses a signature system to identify each instrument and component in a complex system. The Web-server application is developed in HTML, JavaScript and Java, and in C language for the CGI interface, which resides in a controller portion of LabVIEW. The LabVIEW software fully integrates the Web sever, LabVIEW data acquisition boards and controllers, and the 3-dimensional switching matrix board. The paper will analyze a half-wave rectifier (AC - DC converter) circuit connected over the Internet using the PermLAB. PermLAB allows students to obtain real data by real-time wiring of real circuits in the laboratory using a "virtual breadboard" on the Web. The software for the Web-based 3-dimensional system is flexible, portable, can be integrated into many laboratory applications or expanded, and easily accessible worldwide.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SD
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• v.43 no.11 s.353
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• pp.58-68
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• 2006

This work proposes a 10b 250MS/s $1.8mm^2$ 85mW 0.13um CMOS A/D Converter (ADC) for high-performance integrated systems such as next-generation DTV and WLAN simultaneously requiring low voltage, low power, and small area at high speed. The proposed 3-stage pipeline ADC minimizes chip area and power dissipation at the target resolution and sampling rate. The input SHA maintains 10b resolution with either gate-bootstrapped sampling switches or nominal CMOS sampling switches. The SHA and two MDACs based on a conventional 2-stage amplifier employ optimized trans-conductance ratios of two amplifier stages to achieve the required DC gain, bandwidth, and phase margin. The proposed signal insensitive 3-D fully symmetric capacitor layout reduces the device mismatch of two MDACs. The low-noise on-chip current and voltage references can choose optional off-chip voltage references. The prototype ADC is implemented in a 0.13um 1P8M CMOS process. The measured DNL and INL are within 0.24LSB and 0.35LSB while the ADC shows a maximum SNDR of 54dB and 48dB and a maximum SFDR of 67dB and 61dB at 200MS/s and 250MS/s, respectively. The ADC with an active die area of $1.8mm^2$ consumes 85mW at 250MS/s at a 1.2V supply.