Here's my problem: I need to use a linear 3.3V regulator with an extremely low power consumption for a project that I've been working on.
The regulator in question is the XC6215B332MR-G which is a tiny marvel that draws only 0.8µA when idle. All in all, my entire circuit (which includes a PIC16LF1823 MCU) ends up drawing less than 14µA when fully working.
The thing is, that until now, my circuit has been working using a power supply of 6V, which is in the very upper limit allowed as input for the XC6215B332MR-G, according to its datasheet. But now I need to draw power from a 15V source, which I'm sure will blow said regulator out of this world fairly quickly if connected directly.
The closest match I could find to replace that chip with another one that could tolerate that high of an input voltage is the AP2205-33W5-7, but the problem is that its datasheet states that it draws around 35µA when idle. Which is more than twice what my complete circuit is already drawing.
Question, is there a practical way to drop the 15V input voltage down to about 6V whilst wasting as little power as possible? The first thought that popped into my head was to use a brute force approach and place an array of many diodes in series between the power supply and the regulator's input so that they could drop the 11V extra volts from the supply.... but I suspect that things cannot be that simple...
The regulator in question is the XC6215B332MR-G which is a tiny marvel that draws only 0.8µA when idle. All in all, my entire circuit (which includes a PIC16LF1823 MCU) ends up drawing less than 14µA when fully working.
The thing is, that until now, my circuit has been working using a power supply of 6V, which is in the very upper limit allowed as input for the XC6215B332MR-G, according to its datasheet. But now I need to draw power from a 15V source, which I'm sure will blow said regulator out of this world fairly quickly if connected directly.
The closest match I could find to replace that chip with another one that could tolerate that high of an input voltage is the AP2205-33W5-7, but the problem is that its datasheet states that it draws around 35µA when idle. Which is more than twice what my complete circuit is already drawing.
Question, is there a practical way to drop the 15V input voltage down to about 6V whilst wasting as little power as possible? The first thought that popped into my head was to use a brute force approach and place an array of many diodes in series between the power supply and the regulator's input so that they could drop the 11V extra volts from the supply.... but I suspect that things cannot be that simple...