Development of energy-efficient fast-transient CMOS low-dropout regulators for SoC applications

This paper presents three different topologies of energy-efficient fast-transient low-dropout regulators (LDOs) for SoC applications. They include: 1) an output-capacitorless LDO with a direct voltage-spike detection circuit, 2) an output-capacitorless 90-nm LDO compensated by a single Miller capacitor, and 3) a power-efficient 90-nm LDO with multiple small gain stages. The LDO designs demonstrate some recently developed circuit techniques to improve both the regulation accuracy and transient performance. Experimental results are included in this paper to verify the achieved performance.