TY - JOUR U1 - Zeitschriftenartikel, wissenschaftlich - begutachtet (reviewed) A1 - Seidel, Achim A1 - Costa, Marco A1 - Joos, Joachim A1 - Wicht, Bernhard T1 - Area efficient integrated gate drivers based on high-voltage charge storing JF - IEEE journal of solid-state circuits N2 - For area reasons, NMOS transistors are preferred over PMOS for the pull-up path in gate drivers. Bootstrapping has to ensure sufficient NMOS gate overdrive. Especially in high-current gate drivers with large transistors, the bootstrap capacitor is too large for integration. This paper proposes three options of fully integrated bootstrap circuits. The key idea is that the main bootstrap capacitor is supported by a second bootstrap capacitor, which is charged to a higher voltage and ensures high charge allocation when the driver turns on. A capacitor sizing guideline and the overall driver implementation including a suitable charge pump for permanent driver activation is provided. A linear regulator is used for bootstrap supply and it also compensates the voltage drop of the bootstrap diode. Measurements from a testchip in 180 nm high-voltage BiCMOS confirm the benefit of high-voltage charge storing. The fully integrated bootstrap circuit with two stacked 75.8 pF and 18.9 pF capacitors results in an expected voltage dip of lower than 1 V. Both bootstrap capacitors require 70% less area compared to a conventional bootstrap circuit. Besides drivers, the proposed bootstrap can also be directly applied to power stages to achieve fully integrated switched mode power supplies or class-D output stages. KW - bootstrap circuit KW - class-D output stage KW - CMOS output stage KW - driver circuits KW - gate driver KW - high voltage KW - integrated switched mode power supply KW - rail-to-rail outputs KW - switching converters Y1 - 2015 SN - 0018-9200 SS - 0018-9200 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1109/JSSC.2015.2410797 DO - https://doi.org/10.1109/JSSC.2015.2410797 VL - 50 IS - 7 SP - 1550 EP - 1559 S1 - 10 PB - IEEE CY - New York, NY ER -