A 160nA Quiescent Current and 97.0% Peak Efficiency AOT Buck Converter With Adaptive Dead-Time Control

This paper presents a 160 nA quiescent current adaptive on-time (AOT) dc-dc buck converter with a wide load range for ultra-low power application. The dynamic-bias and adaptive-bias techniques are utilized to reduce the total quiescent current. The AOT and three modes of control technologies are designed to realized the higher efficiency compared with conventional voltage and current mode control. An adaptive dead-time controller is proposed to improve the efficiency of the proposed buck converter. It was implemented in a 22 nm CMOS technology. The simulation results show the converter can achieve a 97.0% peak efficiency and the efficiencies can be greater than 88% from 20 µA to 1 A in the whole input range. The input voltage ranges from 1.8-3.6 V and output voltage is 1.4 V for 1 µA to 1 A (1000,000X) load range.