DC-DC converters: From discrete towards fully integrated CMOS

Monolithic integration of electronic systems is one of the major techniques to reduce cost, size and power consumption in state-of-the-art consumer applications. Integration of transceivers and other mixed-signal building blocks has proven to be a very successful approach to build low cost, compact and portable systems [1]. Remarkably a certain building block remains discrete in commercial applications: the switched-power supply. This paper will demonstrate how recent research efforts cleared the path to develop fully integrated DC-DC converters in standard CMOS.