2022 Volume 19 Issue 22 Pages 20220398
This paper presents a novel thermal protection circuit for low dropout regulators (LDOs). To avoid thermal damage under high power conditions, the output current of LDOs varies with the sensed load temperature. Both the current delivery capability at a pre-set temperature and the limit slope of load current can be tuned to accommodate different load conditions and temperatures. The proposed design was fabricated with a 0.18µm CMOS process with a chip area of 0.073mm2. Chip measurement results show that the proposed design reduces charging time by 18% over the conventional thermal shutdown structure.