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,  

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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.