Optimization of LDO voltage regulators by NSGA-II

Abstract

Two different low-dropout (LDO) voltage regulators are optimized by applying the Non-Dominated Sorting Genetic Algorithm II (NSGA-II). First, from a sensitivity analysis a set of design variables are selected to establish a reduced chromosome for performing multi-objective optimization by NSGA-II. The computed sensitivities are used to reduce the search spaces for the design variables included into the chromosome, so that the optimization process is accelerated. Second, a comparison between traditional and optimization-based design approaches is shown by considering 2 figures of merit (FoM). Finally, we list the results for optimizing 2 LDO voltage regulators for the 2 FoMs, and provide optimized sizes that are compared to traditional design.