Capacitor-less LVR for a 32-bit automotive microcontroller SoC in 65nm CMOS

Abstract

In this paper an output capacitor-less linear voltage regulator (LVR) for very fast load transients of up to 100mA/10ns is proposed. The LVR is designed for providing the core voltage supply of a microcontroller (μC) system in an automotive environment. It makes use only of the load capacitance of the μC core without any additional buffer capacitor. The target supply voltage ranges from 2.97V to 5.5V while the output voltage is 1.3V. The maximum load current is 200mA while consuming 176μA quiescent current. A test chip of the LVR was fabricated in a 65nm digital CMOS process and the measurement results are presented.