A current-mode sense amplifier for low voltage non-volatile memories

Author

Calligaro, Cristiano ; Rolandi, Paolo ; Telecco, Nicola ; Torelli, Guido

Author_Institution

Dipartimento di Elettronica, Pavia Univ., Italy

fYear

1996

fDate

9-11 Oct 1996

Firstpage

141

Lastpage

147

Abstract

The market demand for high speed and low voltage non-volatile memories asks for much more efficient sense amplifiers. Actually a good sense amplifier works with 5 V power supply and is able to detect the cell content in less than 20 ns but in the future these constraints will become 3 V for power supply and less than 10 ns for sensing time. In this paper a 3 V power supply with 9 ns sensing time current mode sense amplifier is presented. It has been designed for a very small EPROM array and integrated in a 0.8 μm technology (0.6 μm in the matrix). Experimental result shows the overall sensing time to be lower than 10 ns even with 2.7 V power supply

Keywords

CMOS memory circuits; EPROM; differential amplifiers; 0.6 micron; 0.8 micron; 2.7 to 3 V; 9 ns; CMOS technology; EPROM array; LV nonvolatile memories; current-mode sense amplifier; low voltage memories; Capacitance; Circuits; EPROM; Feedback loop; Impedance; Low voltage; Microelectronics; Nonvolatile memory; Power amplifiers; Power supplies;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Innovative Systems in Silicon, 1996. Proceedings., Eighth Annual IEEE International Conference on

Conference_Location

Austin, TX

ISSN

1063-2204

Print_ISBN

0-7803-3639-9

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/ICISS.1996.552421

Filename

552421