A Single-Inductor Dual-Output Converter With the Stacked MOSFET Driving Technique for Low Quiescent Current and Cross Regulation

Abstract

Stacked MOSFET structures made of low-voltage devices suffer from degraded transient response or large footprint when a capacitorless or dominant-pole compensated low-dropout (LDO) regulator biases the driver. Due to the self-stabilizing nature, the proposed stacked MOSFET driver (SMD) technology effectively drives the power stage and greatly reduces the noise at the switching nodes for low cross regulation (CR) in a single-inductor dual-output (SIDO) converter. In addition, two inherent LDO regulators in SMD technology fully regulate the dual outputs with the advantage of low quiescent current at no-load conditions. The experimental results show that the test chip fabricated under the 0.25-mu m process has low CR of 0.015 mV/mA and ultralow quiescent current of 5 mu A under no-load conditions.