In this paper, a high voltage current sensing circuit for boost converter is designed and verified by Cadence SPECTRE simulations. The current mirror pair, power and sensing metal-oxide semiconductor field effect transistors (MOSFETs) with size ratio of K, is used in our on-chip current sensing circuit. Very low drain voltages of the current mirror pair should be matched to give accurate current sensing, so a folded-cascode opamp with a PMOS input pair is used in our design. A high voltage high side lateral-diffused MOS transistor (LDMOST) switch is used between the current sensing circuit and power MOSFET to protect the current sensing circuit from the high output voltage. Simulation results using 0.35 μm BCD process show that current sensing is accurate and the pulse frequency modulation (PFM) boost converter using the proposed current sensing circuit satisfies with the specifications.

Abstract: In this paper, High brightness LED (light-emitting diodes) driver IC (integrated circuit) using new current sensing circuit is proposed. This LED driver IC can provide a constant current with high current precision over a wide input voltage range. The proposed current-sensing circuit is composed of a cascode current sensor and a current comparator with only one reference voltage. This IC minimizes the voltage stress of the MOSFET (metal oxide semiconductor field effect transistor) from the maximum input voltage and has low power consumption and chip area by using simple-structured comparator and minimum bias current. To confirm the functioning and characteristics of our proposed LED driver IC, we designed a buck converter. The LED current ripple of the designed IC is in ±5% and a tolerance of the average LED current is lower than 2.43%. This shows much improved feature than the previous method. Also, protections for input voltage and operating temperature are designed to improve the reliability of the designed IC. Designed LED driver IC uses 1.0 ㎛X-Fab. BiCMOS process parameters and electrical characteristics and functioning are verified by spectre (Cadence) simulation.