The present invention provides an LDO regulator having a greatly improved
overshoot characteristic through the use of an output voltage based
feedback loop. More specifically, in the invention, one or more resistors
in the divider network in a conventional LDO regulator is replaced with a
variable resistor. By varying the resistance of the variable resistor as
a function of the output voltage of the LDO regulator, the closed-loop
gain of the LDO amplifier may be modulated in such a way as to reduce
overshoot in the output voltage of the LDO regulator. In particular, the
targeted final output voltage value may be arbitrarily lowered for a
predetermined period of time, so that the LDO regulator output may
rapidly reach a steady state voltage that is very close to the final
desired regulating value without exceeding the final desired regulating
value during regulator startup.