A 96% Peak Efficiency Adaptively Controlled PSM Buck Converter With Low-Quiescent Current and Wide Dynamic Range for IoT Applications

This letter presents a fully adaptive pulse-skip modulation (APSM) buck converter with low-quiescent current and wide dynamic range for Internet of Things (IoT) systems-on-chip (SoC), which generates 0.6–1.5-V supply voltage from a battery (2.4–3.6 V). The proposed adaptive frequency modulator reduces quiescent current at no expense of transient response performance. Also, the proposed adaptive pulse-width modulator extends the dynamic range with suppressed output ripple. The chip was fabricated in a 180-nm BCD process, occupying an active area of 0.56 mm2. The measurement results show that the buck converter achieves 8-nA quiescent current and 10 nA to 10 mA $(1\times 10^{6})$ dynamic range. The measured peak efficiency is 96% at 3-V input voltage. A decent efficiency of 80% is also obtained even with 300-nA light load condition.