High-Efficiency Regulated Charge Pump for Non-Volatile Memories

Voltage elevators are key components in non-volatile memory devices, where a number of voltages higher than the supply voltage are required to program memory cells. The conventional strategy to control these voltages imposes an overhead on the charge pump output voltage and makes use of analog blocks supplied from the high voltage generator, thus wasting a considerable amount of power in the regulation loop. This paper proposes a new linear regulator topology for use in on-chip voltage multipliers that achieves high power efficiency and occupies smaller area.