• 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.

• Journal of the Korea Academia-Industrial cooperation Society
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• v.17 no.9
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• pp.21-26
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• 2016

This paper presents a step-down DC-DC buck converter with a CCM/DCM dual-mode function for the internal power stage of portable electronic device. The proposed converter that is operated with a high frequency of 1 MHz consists of a power stage and a control block. The power stage has a power MOS transistor, inductor, capacitor, and feedback resistors for the control loop. The control part has a pulse width modulation (PWM) block, error amplifier, ramp generator, and oscillator. In this paper, an external capacitor for compensation has been replaced with a multiplier equivalent CMOS circuit for area reduction of integrated circuits. In addition, the circuit includes protection block, such as over voltage protection (OVP), under voltage lock out (UVLO), and thermal shutdown (TSD) block. The proposed circuit was designed and verified using a $0.18{\mu}m$ CMOS process parameter by Cadence Spectra circuit design program. The SPICE simulation results showed a peak efficiency of 94.8 %, a ripple voltage of 3.29 mV ripple, and a 1.8 V output voltage with supply voltages ranging from 2.7 to 3.3 V.