Basics of floating-gate low-dropout voltage regulators

Abstract

This paper presents an overview of series voltage regulators, beginning with single-transistor designs and exploring the various design issues and concepts. The regulating characteristics of nFET and pFET single-transistor regulators are compared analytically and experimentally to determine an optimal starting topology. The design of these simple regulators is taken a step further by applying floating-gate techniques to improve the flexibility of the existing design and the ability to customize the regulator bias points.