Well it would be a nice world is that were something you could take to the bank... but "Out of Regulation" is undefined and as such is highly questionable and based more on wishful thinking than reality. The reality is that you have a very high gain DC amplifier with an unstable reference voltage. a more understandable comparison might well be that you have a really big car (The Regulator) moving across an area (output Voltage) without a driver (The Reference Voltage) High gain because the reference term is a current (Typ 100uA) controlling a regulator capable of an Ampere of current and it doesn't take a genius to figure out that 100 uA is a tenth of a milliamp and as the name implies a milliamp is 1/1000th of an ampere so we have a gain of 10 X 1000 and no stable input reference. The typical result for an NPN pass type (AKA 78XX series) is oscillation and for the PNP Pass types like the AMS1117 the reference term is a part of the load current... So there is a minimum current that must be drawn from the regulator for the regulator to be stable and a processor unfortunately doesn't fit that condition... again the result is typically oscillation. I first ran into this issue trying to shift the output voltage of an LM2931AZ-5.0 (Data sheet attached) from 5 to 6.2V. Normally the ground pin which carries the reference current for the regulator is connected to a resistor to ground and the output of the regulator is fed back to the ground pin creating a "new" Ground reference voltage and thus shifting the output voltage by the amount of voltage dropped across the resistor to ground. Simple? Right? NO because if the input voltage is slow to come to value even be as little as a hundred uS it causes the regulator to oscillate at about a MHz or so and since the output filter is a short circuit at that frequency the regulator gets hot, goes into thermal limiting, cools down and then does the whole thing again and again it can be simulated easily by placing a 10 ohm resistor in series with the supply lead and not bypassing the input... Just 10 ohms. An interesting side note is that a 78l05 plugged into the same circuit works perfectly because the 78XX series of devices uses an NPN pass transistor and the reference supply is different, internally. In short IF a Regulator isn't biased properly it's output is undetermined and really undeterminable. The Chip designer had some variables and some constants in his design, load current and Minimum reference supply voltage, If you don't meet those conditions then your circuit's response is undeterminable. This statement makes me want to ask where you buy your drugs from...
Plus, out of regulation doesn't mean it doesn't pass power anymore. It just that its ability to regulate output voltage is gone.
Now what can that mean? What kind of POWER DOES IT PASS... if at all. My intent here is to point out that just because it might work in basic testing is no guarantee that it will work accurately and to "Some" specification under varying input and load conditions. which is basically what you said when you said that it wasn't a "regulator" anymore the problem is that not meeting basic spec means literally that the "regulator" is more a liability than an asset. IMNSHO
Bob
LM2931.pdf (264 KB)