An Optimized Stacked Driver for Synchronous Buck Converter

Half-rail stacked drivers are used to reduce power consumption of the drivers for synchronous buck converters. In this paper, the stacked driver is optimized by matching the average charging and discharging currents used by high-side and low-side drivers. By matching the two currents, the average intermediate bias voltage can remain constant without the aid of the voltage regulator as long as the voltage ripple stays within the window defined by the hysteresis of the regulator. Thus the optimized driver in this paper can minimize the power consumption in the regulator. The current matching requirement yields the value for the intermediate bias voltage, which deviates from the half-rail voltage. Furthermore the required capacitance is also reduced in this design due to decreased charging current, which results in significantly reduced die area. The detailed analysis and design of the stacked driver is verified through simulations done using 5V MOSFET parameters of a typical 0.35-㎛ CMOS process. The difference in power loss between the conventional half-rail driver and the proposed driver is less than 1%. But the conventional half-rail driver has excess charge stored in the capacitor, which will be dissipated in the regulator unless reused by an external circuit. Due to the reduction in the required capacitance, the estimated saving in chip area is approximately 18.5% compared to the half-rail driver.