Documente Academic
Documente Profesional
Documente Cultură
iRY1971
UNREGULATED
AbstractA temperature-compensated voltage reference that
INPUT
provides numerous advantages over zener diodes is described
along with the implementation of thermal overload protection for
SERIES PASS
monolithic circuits. The application of these and other advanced TRANSISTOR
design techniques to IC voltage regulators is covered, and an ex-
ample of a practical design is given.
INTRODUCTION
ONOLITHIC regulators have been receiving REGULATED
considerable attention during the last year or OUTPUT
M two. With the exception of operational am-
plifiers and voltage comparators, regulators
categories of linear devices in sales. Hence, considerable
effort has gone into improving their performance
Ieacl other
and gen-
REFERENCE & UR2
eral utility.
Increasing the output-current capability, reducing the
Fig. 1. Bmic series regulator circuit.
number of external components, and minimizing external
trimming are obvious areas for improvement of older
designs. Higher reliability under actual field conditions inducting the pass transistor in an integrated-circuit
is less obvious, but probably more essential. Lfinimum regulator [1], First, there are no stanclard multilead
input voltages less than the present 79 V would also power packages. Second, integrated circuits necessarily
increase the usefulness of these circuits. have a lower maximum operating temperature because
Some techniques for realizing these objectives will be they contain low-level circuitry. This means that an IC
described. Further, a practical design for an on-card regulator needs a more massive heat sink. Third, the
regulator that provicles 5 V for logic circuits will be gross variations in chip temperature due to dissipation
given. This circuit has three active leads, so it can be in the pass transistors worsen load and line regulation.
supplied in standard transistor power packages. It re- However, these problems can be largely overcome using
quires no external components and can reliably deliver the new techniques, especially for the kincl of regulator
output currents in excess of 1 A. requirecl by digital systems.
It is conceptually possible to build a complete IC
DESIGN CONCEPTS regulator that has only three external terminals. Hence,
A ~imp]ified schematic of a typical wlt.age regulator an ordinary transistor power package can be used, cir-
is shown in Fig. 1. An operational amplifier compares cumventing the package problem. The practicality of
a reference voltage with a fraction of the output voltage this approach depends on eliminating the adjustments
and controls a series-pass transistor to regulate the out- usually requirec~ to set up the output voltage and limit-
put. Some form of overload protection is usually pro- ing current for the particular application, as external
vided. Here, the output current is limited by Q1 and RI. adjustments require extra pins. A new solicl-state ref-
The low cost of IC regulators has created a consider- erence, to be described later, has sufficiently tight manu-
able interest in on-card regulation, that is, to provide facturing tolerances that output voltages do not al-.
local regulation for each printed-circuit card in a sys- ways have to be individually trimmed. Further, thermal
tem. Rough preregulation is used in the main power overload protection can protect an IC regulator for
source, and the power is distributed without excessvie virtually any set of operating conditions, making adjust-
concern for line drops. The local regulators then smooth ments unnecessary.
out the voltage variatiom caused by line drops and elim- Thermal protection limits the maximum juncf:ion tem-
inate the transients on the main power bus. perature, providing a constant-power limit that protects
A useful on-card regulator must include everything the regulator regardless of input voltage, type of over-
within one package, including the series-pass transistor. load, or degree of heat sinking. With an external pass
The author has previously advancecl arguments against transistor, there is no convenient way to sense junction
temperature, so it is much more difficult to provide ther-
mal limiting. Thermal protection is, in itself, a very good
Manuscript received March 23, 1970; revised July 10, 1970.
The author is with National Semiconductor, Santa Clara, Calif. reason for putting the pass transistor on the chip.
w~: IC VOLTAGERE(NJLAToRs 3
+
When a regulator is protected by current limiting
alone, it is necessary to limit the output current to a
value substantially lower than is dictated by dissipation
under normal operating conditions to prevent excessive
heating when a fault occurs. Thermal limiting provides )-vREF=VEE+#AvSE
zero, giving
(5)
, 01
6
) OUTPUT
63
ml RIO
200
,
(
- OUTPUT
rw
mv
A A A GROUND
GROUND
Fig. 4. Schematic showing essential details of the 5-V regulator.
Fig. 5. Detailed schematic of the regulator.
/
3
I
/f \ .
2
L
VOT = 4.5V
n
5 10 15 20 25 30 35
101
I , ,
vl~ = Iov
r TA = 25C
Fig. 9. Photomicrograph at the regulator shows that a high-cur-
rent pass transistor takes more area than control circuitry.
TABLE I
TYPICAL CHARACTERISTICS OF THE LOGIC-CARD REGULATOR:
Td=250CANDV1N=9V
INPUT w OUTPUT
cl - -
0,22 ,uF - -
4.5
4.5
5 10 16 20 25 -75-50 -26 0 25 50 75 100 125150
INPUT VOLTAGE (V) JUNCTION TEMPERATURE (C)
Fig. 11. Variation of quiescent current with input voltage at Fig. 12. Variation of quiescent current with temperature for
various temperatures. various load currents.
this is shown in Fig. 10. The regulated output voltage is possibilities for replacing zener diodes in applications
impressed across Rl, developing a reference current. The requiring good long-term stability,
quiescent current of the regulator, coming out of the Thermal overload protection that directly senses
ground terminal, is added to this. These combined cur- and controls the junction temperature of the pass tran-
rents produce a voltage drop across R2 that raises the sistor should improve the reliability of regulators con-
output voltage. Hence, any voltage above 5 V can be siderably. This is particularly obvious if the largely un-
obtained as long as the voltage across the integrated predictable electrical and environmental conditions to
circuit is kept within ratings. which a regulator may be exposed in field use are taken
The LM109was designed so that its quiescent current into account. Some degree of thermal protection can be
is not affected greatly by variations in input voltage, incorporated into a discrete regulator. However, proper
load, or temperature. However, it is not completely in- design is quite difficult and the protection is not com-
sensitive, as shown in Figs. 11 and 12 so the changes do pletely effective because it is not possible to measure
affect regulation somewhat. This tendency is minimized directly the junction temperature of the power transistor.
by making the reference current through RI larger than
the quiescent current. Even so, it is difficult to get the REFERENCES
regulation tighter than two percent. [11 R. J. Widlar, Designing positive voltage regulators, EEE,
vol. 17, pp. 9097, June 1969.
[21 D. F. Hilbibe~, A new semiconductor voltage standard,
CONCLUSIONS 1964 ISSCC Dzgest Tech. Papers, vol. 7, pp. 32-33.
The techniques described significantly advance the [31 J. S. Brugler, Silicon transistor biasing for linear collector
current temperature dependence, ZEEE J. Solid-State Cir-
state of the art in IC regulators and can be expected to cuits, vol. SC-2, pp. 57-5$ June 1967.
make them even more attractive as a substitute for dis- [41 R. J. Widlar, Some cmcuit design techniques for linear
integrated circuits, IEEE Tram Circuit Theory, vol. CT-12,
crete designs. A 5-V regulator has already been made, . 586590, December 1965.
.pp.
[51 An exact expression for the thermal variation of the
and the validity of the approach established on mass- emitter base voltage of hi-polar transistors, Proc. IEEE
produced devices. In the future, fully adjustable regu- (Letters), vol. 55, pp. 96-97, January 1967.
lators that operate on input voltages as low as 2 V can [61 Design of monolithic linear circuits, in Handbook of
Sem~conductor Electronics, L. P. Hunter, Ed. New York:
be expected. Furthermore, the reference shows definite McGraw-Hill, 1970, ch. 10, pp. 10.1-10.32.