A 5MHz, 24V-to-1.2V, AO2T current mode buck converter with one-cycle transient response and sensorless current detection for medical meters

With a stringent input-to-output conversion ratio (CR) of 20 (24V input and 1.2V output) for a DC-DC converter, two stage cascaded architectures are easy to implement, but suffer from poor efficiency and doubled number of power components. This paper presents a single-stage solution with a proposed Adaptive ON-OFF Time (AO²T) control. In steady state, the control works as an adaptive ON-time valley current mode control to accommodate the large CR. During load transient periods, both ON- and OFF-time are adaptively adjustable to instantaneous load change, in order to accomplish fast load transient response within one switching cycle. To facilitate the high speed current mode control, a sensorless current detection circuit is also proposed. Operating at 5MHz, the converter achieves a maximum efficiency of 89.8% at 700mA and an efficiency of 85% at 2A full load. During a load current slew rate of 1.8A/200ns, the undershoot/overshoot voltages at VO are 23mV and 37mV respectively.