Fast Transient Radiation Hardened Low Dropout Voltage Regulator for Space Applications
This article presents a fast transient radiation hardened low dropout (LDO) voltage regulator integrated in a standard 0.6 <inline formula> <tex math notation="LaTeX"\mu \text {m} /tex math>/inline formula> BiCMOS technology for space and other harsh radiation environment applications. The fabricated LDO consumes 150 <inline formula> <tex math notation="LaTeX"\mu \text {A} /tex math>/inline formula> quiescent current at 6 A maximum output current. An LDO voltage of 300 mV which corresponds to an ultralow <inline formula> <tex math notation="LaTeX"$R_{\text {DS}\text {ON} /tex math>/inline formula> resistance of 50 <inline formula> <tex math notation="LaTeX"\text{m}\Omega /tex math>/inline formula> is realized by accurate modeling. A separate fast transient response circuit under narrow bandwidth condition is proposed to improve the output voltage transient speed. It operates from an input voltage range of 2.8 5.5 V and provides an output voltage of 2.5 V, with output voltage accuracy of 2% The proposed LDO achieves a successful line regulation of 1 mV/V, and a load regulation of 2.16 mV/A. Effective radiation hardened layout techniques are applied to realize high area efficient LDO chip, whose total area including pads is 5.35 mm<sup>2</sup> which represents only about one third area of similar radiation hardened products. Furthermore, a special set of total ionizing dose (TID) experiments and single event latch up (SEL) experiments were performed. The measurement results show that the LDO can tolerate up to a TID of 150 krad (Si) and SEL immunity at a linear energy transfer (LET) of 99.8 MeV/(mg/cm<sup>2</sup> with proposed layout design.
IEEE Transactions on Nuclear Science