A novel on-chip CMOS current sensor implemented by switched

capacitors for a current-mode control DC-DC Buck converter

Yong Zhang *Wengao Lu Juan Guo Yajing Zhang Zhongjian Chen Yacong Zhang Lijiu Ji
Key Laboratory of Microelectronic Devices and Circuits, Institute of Microelectronics, Peking
University, 100871, China
Abstract A novel on-chip CMOS current sensor
implemented by switched capacitors for a current mode buck
converter is presented in this paper. This proposed current
sensing circuit does not need another sense MOSFET and a
voltage-to-current and current-to-voltage transform circuit. We
use the 0.35um DPTM CMOS process to design and simulate
this circuit. Test result shows that the accuracy and the speed of
the proposed current sensing circuit are high.
Index Terms current sensing circuit current mode
DC switched capacitors

DC-

I. INTRODUCTION
Switched mode power supply is essential part in the
new generation portable systems, for efficiently
converting time varying input battery voltages to fixed
output voltages which supply power to internal circuit
blocks of the systems. Sensing inductor current is one of
fundamental functions needed in the current-mode
converter, for it is used in the pulse-width-modulation
(PWM) module to generate appropriate duty cycle for
output voltage regulation [1].
Current sensing circuit is one of the most important
circuits in a DC-DC converter. Conventional current
sensing methods include series resistor, MOS conducting
resistor, OP-amplifier-based and current-mirror-based
structures>@. In this paper, we propose a novel current
sensor circuit, it benefits of both MOS conducting resistor
and OP-amplifier-based current sensing structure without
their drawbacks. It does not need another sense MOSFET
compared to OP-amplifier-based current sensing circuit
and it does not need to include a voltage-to-current and
current-to-voltage transform circuit compared to currentmirror-based current sensing circuit.

sense MOSFET), switches MS1, MS2, and MS3, an

amplifier, an input capacitor C1 and a feedback capacitor
C2. The on resistance of switches MS1, MS2 and MS3
can be neglected. When Q is high, the power MOSFET
MP and the switch MS3 are off and switches MS1 and
MS2 are on. The input capacitor C1 is charged by VIN
and the amplifier works as a buffer. Vsense equals to Vref
which is a reference voltage at the positive end of the
amplifier. The electron charged in the C1 is (VINVref)*C1 while C2 is zero, because C2 is shorted by the
switch MS1.When Q is low, the power MOSFET MP and
the switch MS3 are on and switches MS1 and MS2 are off.
According to the principle of charge conservation, charge
will redistribute in the C1 and C2. The electron charged in
the capacitor C1 is (VLX-Vref)*C1, and the electron
charged in the capacitor C2 is (Vref-Vsense)*C2.
In a high frequency buck converter, the leak charge
between Q switch from high-to-low or low-to-high can be
neglected. So we get the following equation as

(VIN Vref )C1= (VLX Vref )C1+ (Vsense Vref )C2

Rearranging equation (1), we get

Vsense Vref =

C1
(VIN VLX )
C2

A. Structure And Operational Principle

978-1-4577-1997-4/11/$26.00 2011 IEEE

(2)

From the equation (2) we know that the voltage drop of

power MOSFET MP (VIN-VLX) is amplified by C1/C2, and
the value of (Vsense-Vref) is proportionally to the load
current of the buck converter.

II. PROPOSED CURRENT SENSOR CIRCUIT

Fig.1 shows the structure of the proposed current sensor

for the buck converter, which consists of a sensing
MOSFET transistor MP (we used the power MOSFET as

(1)

Fig. 1.

Structure of the proposed current sensor

B. Plot Of Key Point And Further Improvement

5V input and 1A current load. We can see that in the

heavy load situation the output ripple is 18.4mv (The
spikes are noise couple during test mode) .Therefore, the
inductor current can be sensed correctly and timely by the
proposed current sensor in the DC-DC converter.

Fig. 2. Plot of VLX ,VIN-VLX during MP on time and plot of

Vsense of the proposed current sensor

Fig.2 shows the plot of VLX,VIN-VLX during MP on

time and plot of Vsense of the proposed current sensor.
This current sense circuit amplifies the voltage drop of
the power MOSFET directly. We can get very high
accuracy for the ratio of C1/C2 can be accurate in the onchip design. It is worth to mention that the ratio of C1/C2
can be controlled by digital method. As Fig. shows, the
switches S0, S1, S2 close in different current load. So this
current sense module can support variable gain in different
working states and it makes easier to get a stable system in
current mode than conventional current sense circuit
which can only support a fixed gain. This digital
controlled gain improves the response time of the
proposed current sensor further.

Fig. 4.

Buck converter using the proposed current sensor

Fig. 5.

Output ripple of buck converter

IV CONCLUSIONS
A novel on-chip current-sensing circuit for a currentmode control DC-DC buck converter has been described
and experimentally verified in this paper. The proposed on
-chip CMOS current sensor improves both speed and
accuracy of the current sensing. The proposed current
sensor is suitable for the current-mode converter operating
at high switching frequencies in battery-operated portable
electronic devices.

Fig. 3. Digital controlled gain implemented by proposed

current sensor

III. EXPERIMENTAL RESULSTS

A DC-DC buck converter using the proposed current
sensing circuit has been implemented with 0.35um DPTM
CMOS process .The layout graph of the proposed current
sensor in the buck converter is showing in Fig.4. This
converter is designed as a constant output 1.8V within 18mv ripple with 2.5v-5.5v input voltage. The experimental
results of output ripple are shown in Fig.5 in the state of

REFERENCES
[1] R.Erickson and D.Maksimovic, Fundamentals of power
electronics, Norwell,MA:Kluwer,2001.
[2] Forghani-zadeh , H.P. and Rincon-Mora, G.A. Currentsensing techniques for DC-DC converters , Circuits and
Systems ,vol.2,pp.577-580,Aug.2002.
[3] Mengmeng Du, Hoi Lee, An Integrated Speed-and
Accuracy Enhanced CMOS Current Sensor With
Dynamically Biased Shunt Feedback for Current-Mode
Buck Regulators, IEEE Trans, Circuits and
systems,vol.57,NO.10.Oct.2011.