Hybrid Control Voltage Regulator for Switched Capacitor Based embedded DC-DC

Buck Converter
Dr. Pradip Mandal
Electronics & Electrical Communication Engineering
IIT Kharagpur
Kharagpur, INDIA
E-mail: pradip@ece.iitkgp.ernet.in

Biswajit Maity
Electronics & Electrical Communication Engineering
IIT Kharagpur
Kharagpur, INDIA
E-mail: biswajitmaity.iitkgp@gmail.com
Abstract- In this paper a novel hybrid control voltage regulator
for switched capacitor based embedded DC-DC buck
converter is presented. Precise output voltage is maintained
with the help of load current as well as switching frequency of
the switched capacitor. To maintain high power efficiency over
a wide range of load current, frequency control regulation is
used whereas good transient performance is achieved with the
current control regulation. Proposed hybrid regulator is
implemented in 0.18m CMOS process with the dual gate
MOS transistor. Total 440pF flying capacitors and 50pF load
capacitor is used to implement
proposed embedded voltage regulator. Proposed regulator
supports up to 30mA load current without any external
component.

Figure 1.1: Schematic diagram of Hybrid Converter with current control

regulation

In the hybrid converter of figure 2.1, Vdd is input supply

voltage and Vout is the regulated output voltage. In hybrid
converter fixed control is applied to the VCO (Voltage
control oscillator) to generate required frequency and phases
of clock. As a result switching frequency ( of the
switched capacitor converter remains constant irrespective of

) also
load current and hence switching power loss (
remains constant irrespective load current. Normally, there
are two types of losses in the switching transistors,
Conduction loss and switching loss. The conduction loss is
due to the finite on resistance of the switching transistor in
its linear region of operation and switching power loss due to
the charging and discharging of gate capacitance. An attempt
is made in [4]-[5] to calculate optimum power efficiency of
SC based DC-DC converter. It is to be noted that, for a given
frequency the switch-capacitor converter gives maximum
efficiency at an output current where the conduction loss and
dynamic losses of the switching transistors are equal. Below
this optimum point the switching loss is constant and the
supply current decreases with decrease in load current and
thus the power efficiency decreases. Above the optimum
point losses due to ESR drop of the capacitor and on
resistance of the switches dominates. So, to achieve the
better performance at lighter load currents the switching
frequency has to be reduced. Hence switched capacitor based
embedded DC-DC converter with current control voltage
regulator underestimates performance of switched capacitor
converter to give optimum performance over whole current
range. To get optimum performance of embedded DC-DC
converter over a wide range of load current, we are
proposing to use load information to determine the switching
frequency of the DC-DC converter as discussed in the next
section.

Keywords: Switching power loss, conduction power loss,

hybrid converter and hybrid regulation.

I. INTRODUCTION
With the advancement of the technology, internal supply
voltage for subcomponent of battery-operated hand held
portable device is decreasing. Whereas, voltage of battery
does not scale down with the same proportion. It leads to a
mismatch of the required supply voltage of an IC and the
available battery voltage. Switched-capacitor based buck
converters are a useful alternative to inductor based DC-DC
converters specifically for the hand held device. Due to size
and weight constraints, inductor based buck converters are
not used for embedded applications. On the other hand,
linear regulator has poor power efficiency, particularly, in
high dropout applications. In such situation, switched
capacitor based converter followed by a low dropout linear
regulator is a good option. In this hybrid converter [1]-[2],
the switched capacitor based converter is used to step down
voltage and the linear regulator is used to get line regulation
and load regulation. Current control regulation is widely
used in low drop out linear regulator [3] as well as hybrid
converter. Overall performances of hybrid converter depend
both on performance of linear regulator as well as
performance of switched capacitor converter. Schematic
diagram of hybrid converter with current control voltage
regulator is illustrated in figure 1.1. Here current control
regulation loop consists of error amplifier, pass transistor
and switched capacitor converter. Drop across pass transistor
is adjusted depending upon load current requirement as well
as input supply voltage and output voltage is precisely
maintained at fixed reference voltage.

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978-1-4244 -8679-3/11/$26.00 2011 IEEE

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II. HYBRID CONTROL VOLTAGE REGULATOR

Proposed voltage regulator consists of two regulation
loop and they are current control regulation loop and
frequency control regulation loop. Schematic diagram of
proposed hybrid control voltage regulation is illustrated in
figure 2.2.

Figure 2.2 Schematic diagram of differential current starved

inverter.

Figure 2.1: Schematic diagram of hybrid converter with hybrid control

regulation

In hybrid voltage regulator of figure 2.1, current control

regulation loop consists of error amplifier, pass transistor
and switched capacitor converter. Whereas frequency
control regulation loop consists of error amplifier, VCO and
switched capacitor converter. Current control regulation loop
is made faster compared to frequency control regulation loop.
Depending upon load current, faster loop adjust the input of
pass transistor such that output is settle to pre-specified
voltage level. At the same time, output of error amplifier is
used to set control voltage of VCO and switching frequency
of switched capacitor converter. We have used Nonoverlapping Rotational switching (NRTI) scheme [5] to
implement SC based DC-DC converter and total 11 phases
of clock are used to drive the switches of the converter. In
NRTI based SC converter, shoot through loss is eliminated
and hence there are mainly two sources of losses in the
NRTI based SC converter. These are conduction power loss
and switching power loss. The phases of the clock are
generated using differential voltage control delay element
(VCDL) as shown in figure 2.2. In differential current
starved inverter, current is limited by the bias voltages at Pb
and Nb and it is called differential current staved inverter.
These upper and bottom transistors act as current source and
sink respectively. The middle transistors act as switches. In
these current starved inverters the delay is varied by varying
the current to charge and discharge its load capacitor. As the
its load capacitor is kept constant, with the decrease in the
charging and discharging current of the inverters, charging
and discharging time (delay) is increased. Similarly by
increasing current, delay is reduced and oscillation
frequency of the VCO is increased. Bias voltage Pb and Nb
are generated from the control voltage of VCO with the help
of simple cascode current mirror [6]. Variation of VCDL
delay due to the variation of control is shown in figure 2.3.

Figure 2.3: Variation of delay for the variation of control voltage

From the figure in 2.3, it can be observed that the

oscillation frequency of VCO can be varied from 10MHz
and 100MHz. For this range of oscillation frequency,
variation of control voltage is from 1.7V to 2.62V. It can be
mentioned that for this range of control voltage, current
control loop works without affecting stability of the
regulator. In addition sizes of MOS switches in SC converter
are decided based on above frequency range. Unity gain
buffer is placed between output of error amplifier and input
of VCO to reduce kick off effect and to ensure that noise due
to VCO does not hamper performance of current control
regulation loop. For an ideal VCO, output frequency and
control voltage are related by the following relation.
 
Here, represents the intercept corresponding to 
=0 and  denotes the gain or sensitivity of the VCO. In
our design as we increase control voltage, oscillation
frequency decreases or delay of VCDL increases. If load
current requirement is increased, error amplifier pulls up its
output voltage such a way that Vout is precisely settled to
reference voltage. As output of error amplifier is increased,
control voltage of VCO increases and switching frequency
decreases and finally switching power loss of the switched
capacitor converter decreases. Hence for the lower load
current, switched frequency is reduced to maintain same
switching power loss and conduction power loss. In addition,
decrease of oscillation frequency also helps to reduce
switching power loss of VCO. On the other hand, for higher
load current output of error amplifier decreases and
oscillation frequency of VCO or switching frequency of SC
converter increases. Hence, both conduction power loss and

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switching power loss increases in same proportion as load

current is increased and optimal power efficiency is obtained.
Due to introduction of frequency control regulation loop
with the current control regulation loop, switching frequency
of SC converter is automatically adjusted and optimum
power efficiency can be achieved. On the other hand for a
fixed load current if input supply changes, switching
frequency is adjusted such a way that switching loss remain
constant and same as conduction loss.
Stability of proposed voltage regulator is analyzed over
a wide range of load current. It is observed that regulator is
stable from 1mA load current to 30mA load current with
50pF load capacitor and 440pF flying capacitors. VCO
consumes 300uA to 500uA supply current for 10MHz to
100MHz oscillation frequency. We have used self biased
telescopic differential amplifier [7] as an error amplifier to
support required load current range and at the same time it
provides high gain and consume less power in comparison
with the folded cascode differential amplifier.

Figure 3.2 Load regulation of proposed voltage regulator

In first plot of figure 3.2, load current variation from
(15mA) to (1mA) and vice-versa has been shown. While in
second plot, variation of output voltage due to the variation
of load current is shown, in third plot variation of control
voltage of VCO due to load current variation is shown and in
fourth plot variation of switching frequency due to load
current variation is shown. Form these plots it be can be
mentioned that as load current varies switching frequency of
the switched capacitor converter also varies to get optimum
performance of the converter. For low load current both
switching power loss and conduction power loss are low and
same. As load current is increased both conduction power
loss and switching power loss is increased to get optimum
power efficiency of the DC-DC converter. Power efficiency
of NRTI based DC-DC converter with current control
regulation and hybrid control regulation is compared in
figure 3.3. From the figure 3.3, it is observed that NRTI
based converter reaches peak efficiency (76%) at 22mA load
current with both current control regulation and hybrid
control regulation. But as load current is decreased power
efficiency of current control regulator falls faster as
compared to the power efficiency of hybrid control regulator.
Similarly as load current is increased power efficiency of
current control regulator falls faster as compared to hybrid
control regulator. It can be mentioned that transition time for
load current variation is 1ns.

III. SIMULATION RESULTS

Proposed hybrid control voltage regulator is
implemented in 0.18m CMOS technology using the dual
oxide MOS transistor. Here simulation results are presented
for typical process corner at normal temperature. It can be
mentioned that we have used NRTI switching scheme [5] to
implement the SC converter and we have increased flying
capacitor value from 330pF to 440pF in order to increase
load current range. The proposed regulator is designed to get
1.35V output from 3.3V supply voltage. Figure 3.1 is used to
show variation of output voltage due to the variation of load
current for both current control regulator and hybrid control
voltage regulator. From the figure, it can be noted that the
load current range has increased in hybrid control voltage
regulator due to optimum performance of the DC-DC
converter over whole current range.

Figure 3.1: Variation of output voltage due to the variation of load current

Load regulation of the proposed hybrid control voltage

regulation is illustrated in figure 3.2.

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control voltage regulator. Transient performances of the

proposed regulator remain unchanged as current control
regulation loop is not changed. Proposed voltage regulator
helps to maintain high efficiency irrespective of load current
requirement. In the digital applications where circuits
switches frequently from sleep mode to normal mode or vice
versa, proposed regulator always gives optimum
performance.
REFERENCE
[1]

[2]
Figure 3.3: Power efficient plot of the NRTI based SC converter

In figure 3.4 line regulation of proposed voltage regulator

has been shown. In the first plot of this figure variation of
input supply voltage has been shown while load current is
kept at 10mA. In second plot output voltage variation due to
input supply variation has been shown. In third plot variation
of control voltage and in fourth plot variation of switching
frequency has been shown.

[3]

[4]

[5]

[6]

[7]

Figure: Line regulation of the proposed voltage regulator

It has been seen from figure 3.4 that as supply voltage is

changed from 3V to 3.6V or vise versa in 1 ns transition time,
switching frequency is adjusted to maintain total switching

constant irrespective of supply

loss (
voltage. As a result total switching power loss and
conduction power loss remain same and constant over a
wide range of supply voltage and we get optimum power
efficiency from the embedded DC-DC buck converter.
IV. CONCLUSION
Performance of proposed hybrid control voltage
regulator is discussed in comparison with current control
voltage regulator for same SC converter. Due to automatic
adjustment of switching frequency of the SC converter,
optimum power efficiency is achieved with the hybrid

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