A Scalable Distributed Linear Regulator With 99.5%-Accuracy Replica-Based Current Sharing Calibration for Automotive Applications

This article presents a scalable distributed linear regulator (SDLR) with on-chip output capacitor, which has 0.5–3.2% small current sharing error (96.8–99.5% current sharing accuracy) without using external components thanks to a replica-based current sharing calibrator. The proposed replica-based current sharing scheme offers significant benefits including low current consumption and universal design solutions for both low-voltage (LV) process and high-voltage (HV) process. Accordingly, the proposed SDLR can be adopted at HV automotive applications with wide operation ranges of V_IN = 4.5–60 V, V_O = 1.2–5 V, and I_O up to 1 A for providing the uniformly regulated V_O over the chip area. Each linear regulator (LR) in the proposed SDLR consumes low quiescent current of 3.5 μA, while the number of LRs can be efficiently scalable with additional 2.7 μA per LR regardless of I_O.