Designing a compact soft-start scheme for voltage-mode DC–DC switching converters

In this paper, a compact soft-start scheme is proposed and successfully applied to typical voltage-mode DC–DC switching converters. The adaptive current limitation implemented through DAC control will largely reduce the overshoot voltage under a wide range of output current. Proven experimentally by a buck converter implemented in a 0.5 μm CMOS technology, the post-simulation results show that when the converter starts up, the maximum overshoot (2.7% at ILOAD=0 A) by the proposed soft-start scheme is less than that with the conventional scheme by 5% under the same condition. The start-up time can be adaptively adjustable depending on load current and the maximum start-up time is around 760 μs with 22 μF output capacitor. The circuits which realize the soft-start scheme can also be fully integrated into the control chip of DC–DC switching converter resulting in low cost.