IEICE Trans - A Flip-Flop Circuit with a Directly Controlled Emitter-Follower and a Level Stabilizer for Low-Power Prescalers

A Flip-Flop Circuit with a Directly Controlled Emitter-Follower and a Level Stabilizer for Low-Power Prescalers

Hisayasu SATO
Nagisa SASAKI
Takahiro MIKI

Publication
IEICE TRANSACTIONS on Electronics Vol.E82-C No.3 pp.504-510
Publication Date: 1999/03/25
Online ISSN:
DOI:
Print ISSN: 0916-8516
Type of Manuscript: Special Section PAPER (Special Issue on Ultra-High-Speed IC and LSI Technology)
Category: Silicon Devices
Keyword:
prescaler, flip-flop, emitter-follower, low power,

Full Text: PDF>>

Summary:
This paper describes a flip-flop circuit using a directly controlled emitter-follower with a diode-feedback level stabilizer (DC-DF) and a resistor-feedback level stabilizer (DC-RF) for low-power multi-GHz prescalers. The new flip-flop circuit reduces the emitter-follower current and gains both high-frequency operation and low-power. A dual modulus (

4/5) prescaler using this circuit technology was fabricated with a 0.35 µm BiCMOS process. The current draw of the prescaler using the DC-RF is 34% smaller than conventional LCML circuits. The DC-RF prescaler operates at 2.11 GHz with a total current consumption of 1.03 mA. In addition, the circuit operates with a supply voltage of down to 2.4 V by using the resistor level-shift clock-driver.