A Low Quiescent Biased Regulator With High PSR Dedicated to Micropower Sensor Circuits

• Published in: IEEE sensors journal 2010-07, Vol.10 (7), p.1266-1275
• Main Authors: Ong, G T, Chan, P K
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Bandgap voltage regulator; Bandwidth; Capacitors; Circuits; CMOS; CMOS technology; Electric potential; Feedback circuits; Feedback control; Filtering; low power; Operational amplifiers; Photonic band gap; power supply rejection; Regulators; Semiconductor device modeling; Sensors; Studies; Voltage; voltage regulator
• ISSN: 1530-437X; 1558-1748
• DOI: 10.1109/JSEN.2009.2038793

A new micropower high power-supply-rejection (PSR) regulator, on the basis of op-amp-less architectural design, is presented in this paper. The proposed regulator is based on the embodiment of the Brokaw bandgap regulator circuit in an additional feedback control loop so as to achieve high efficiency in terms of referenced PSR bandwidth per current. The measured PSR performance without any filtering capacitor for a 50-kΩ nominal resistive load at 1 kHz and 1 MHz are obtained as -76 and -43 dB, respectively. The regulator, making use of native driving devices to improve the headroom, supports the supply range from 2 to 3.3 V. The output voltage is close to 1.8 V, having an untrimmed temperature coefficient of 117 ppm/°C from - 40°C to 125°C while drawing the quiescent current of only 5.65 μA. The regulator occupies an area of 0.047 mm 2 using current source model 1.8 V/3.3 V CMOS 0.18 μm triple-well process technology. The circuit is verified using the realistic BSIM3 models for simulation. Finally, the performance comparison with respect to the measured results of reported works, using technology normalized figure of merit, has validated that the proposed circuit technique offers good PSR results while having the advantages of low quiescent power, small size, and full integration without any off-chip capacitor. The proposed regulator is particularly suitable for micropower sensor circuits.