MULTI-CELL VOLTAGE REGULATOR

摘要

Supply voltage for large-scale digital ICs is usually distributed by power and ground planes that occupy large areas of printed circuit board. It is important to maintain the same voltage potential through the all power plane area for a signal integrity and noise immunity of digital ICs. The paper describes multi-cell voltage regulator for powering large-scale ICs, that provides tight regulation of its output voltage through the whole area of power plane using paralleled regulator-cells. Analysis and test results have shown that modified "droop" paralleling technique, implemented in this multi-cell regulator, provides 5% accuracy current sharing between the cells either at steady state or at load-current transients. It is shown that out-of-phase operation and droop-type output-voltage regulation decrease the peak-to-peak ripple and transient of input and output voltage of regulator almost two fold.