Charge Pump Architectures Based on Dynamic Gate Control of the Pass-Transistors

In this paper, we present two charge pump architectures for nonvolatile memories with dynamic biasing of the gate and the body voltages. By controlling the gate and the body voltage of each pass-transistor, the voltage loss due to the device threshold is removed and the charge is pumped from one stage to the following with a negligible voltage drop and large conductivity. The charge pumps were fabricated in the ST 130-nm digital standard CMOS technology. Compared to conventional charge pumps, larger output voltage and better power efficiency are achieved still retaining a simple two-phase clocking scheme. Measurements performed on four-stage and eight-stage charge pumps are provided.