A low dropout (LDO) voltage regulator is a type of voltage regulator circuit that works well even when the output voltage is very close to the input voltage, improving its power efficiency. This paper proposes the LDO voltage regulator in 0.18-μm CMOS technology. The proposed LDO regulator consists of voltage reference, symmetrical operational transconductance amplifier (OTA), PMOS transistor, resistive feedback network and output capacitor. The NMOS symmetrical OTA is implemented as an error amplifier and a PMOS transistor is employed as a pass device to improve gain and minimize low dropout voltage, respectively. The proposed design is simulated using Spectre simulator in Cadence software to verify its regulator performance. The simulation results show that the proposed LDO is capable to operate from a supply voltage of 1.7-2.0 V with a low dropout voltage of 19.3 mV at a maximum 50 mA load current to regulate output voltage 1.5 V. The active chip is 2.96 mm2 in size. The performance of the proposed LDO is suitable to enhance power management for system on chip (SoC) applications.
