A Fully-Integrated 180 nm CMOS 1.2 V Low-Dropout Regulator for Low-Power Portable Applications

This paper presents the design and postlayout simulation results of a capacitor-less low dropout (LDO) regulator fully integrated in low-cost standard 180 nm Complementary Metal-Oxide-Semiconductor (CMOS) technology which regulates output voltage at 1.2 V from 3.3 to 1.3 battery over −40 120 °C temperature range. To meet with constraints system-on-chip (SoC) battery-operated devices, ultralow power (Iq = 8.6 µA) minimum area consumption (0.109 mm2) are maintained, including reference Vref 0.4 V. It uses high-gain dynamically biased folded-based error amplifier topology optimized for low-voltage operation that achieves an enhanced regulation-fast transient performance trade-off.