An Ultra-Wide Load Range Voltage Converter Using Proactive Phase Frequency Modulation for IoT Sensors

Abstract

Modern sensor nodes have multiple operating states, which causes a conventional voltage converter to perform poorly over a wide load range of the operating states. This paper proposes a voltage converter whose switching frequency and output voltage are proactively adjusted to maintain high conversion efficiency. This allows the converter to exploit a wider frequency range to cover a wide load range. In addition, the proposed converter uses multiple smaller capacitor banks and employs multiphase operation to provide low output ripple voltage. A distributed topology for non-overlapping signal generation is proposed and used in the converter to minimize the number of wires running from connecting the controller to the converter. The proposed voltage converter has been implemented in a chip using a 0.13 um CMOS process. The measurement results demonstrate the ability to support a wide load range of 10 µA to 10 mA, for switching frequencies ranging from 100 kHz to 200 MHz, while providing an efficiency of above 80%.