Efficient and Large-Current-Output Boosted Voltage Generators with Non-Overlapping-Clock-Driven Auxiliary Pumps for Sub-1-V Memory Applications

Kyeong-Sik MIN  Young-Hee KIM  Daejeong KIM  Dong Myeong KIM  Jin-Hong AHN  Jin-Yong CHUNG  

Publication
IEICE TRANSACTIONS on Electronics   Vol.E87-C   No.7   pp.1208-1213
Publication Date: 2004/07/01
Online ISSN: 
DOI: 
Print ISSN: 0916-8516
Type of Manuscript: LETTER
Category: Electronic Circuits
Keyword: 
charge pumps,  voltage generators,  DRAM,  low voltage,  

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Summary: 
A new CMOS positive charge pump (NCP-1) is proposed and compared with the conventional pump in this paper. The comparison indicates that this NCP-1 scheme delivers 1.6 times larger output current into the load with roughly 10% area penalty than the conventional pump. To alleviate the area overhead of NCP-1, another new NCP-2 is proposed, where its current drivability is slightly lower than NCP-1 by as small as 5% but it achieves much smaller layout penalty as small as 2-3% compared with the conventional pump. The effectiveness of NCP-1 is verified experimentally in this paper by using 0.35-µm n-well process technology. These NCP-1 and NCP-2 are useful to DRAMs and NOR-type flash memories with sub-1-V VDD, where their large-output-current nature is favorable.