• Journal of the Korea Institute of Information and Communication Engineering
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• v.16 no.2
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• pp.302-312
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• 2012

In this paper, small-area and high-reliability design techniques of a 512-bit EEPROM are designed for UHF RFID tag chips. For a small-area technique, there are a WL driver circuit simplifying its decoding logic and a VREF generator using a resistor divider instead of a BGR. The layout size of the designed 512-bit EEPROM IP with MagnaChip's $0.18{\mu}m$ EEPROM is $59.465{\mu}m{\times}366.76{\mu}m$ which is 16.7% smaller than the conventional counterpart. Also, we solve a problem of breaking 5V devices by keeping VDDP voltage constant since a boosted output from a DC-DC converter is made discharge to the common ground VSS instead of VDDP (=3.15V) in getting out of the write mode.

• Journal of the Korea Institute of Information and Communication Engineering
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• v.13 no.12
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• pp.2633-2640
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• 2009

We design a small-area, low-power, and high-speed EEPROM for touch screen controller IC. As a small-area EEPROM design, a SSTC (side-wall selective transistor) cell is proposed, and high-voltage switching circuits repeated in the EEPROM core circuit are optimized. A digital data-bus sensing amplifier circuit is proposed as a low-power technology. For high speed, the distributed data-bus scheme is applied, and the driving voltage for both the EEPROM cell and the high-voltage switching circuits uses VDDP (=3.3V) which is higher than the logic voltage, VDD (=1.8V), using a dual power supply. The layout size of the designed 128-KBit EEPROMIP is $662.31{\mu}m{\times}1314.89{\mu}m$.

• Journal of the Korea Institute of Information and Communication Engineering
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• v.15 no.4
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• pp.913-920
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• 2011

In this paper, a logic process based 1-kbit EEPROM IP for RFID tag chips of 900MHz is designed. The cell array of the designed 1-kbit EEPROM IP is arranged in a form of four blocks of 16 rows x 16 columns, that is in a two-dimensional arrangement of one-word EEPROM phantom cells. We can reduce the IP size by making four memory blocks share CG (control gate) and TG (tunnel gate) driver circuits. We propose a TG switch circuit to supply respective TG bias voltages according to operational modes and to keep voltages between devices within 5.5V in terms of reliability in order to share the TG driver circuit. Also, we can reduce the power consumption in the read mode by using a partial activation method to activate just one of four memory blocks. Furthermore, we can reduce the access time by making BL (bit line) switching times faster in the read mode from reduced number of cells connected to each column. We design and compare two 1-kbit EEPROM IPs, two blocks of 32 rows ${\times}$ 16 columns and four blocks of 16 rows ${\times}$ 16 columns, which use Tower's $0.18{\mu}m$ CMOS process. The four-block IP is smaller by 11.9% in the layout size and by 51% in the power consumption in the read mode than the two-block counterpart.

• Journal of the Korea Institute of Information and Communication Engineering
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• v.14 no.8
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• pp.1868-1876
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• 2010

In this paper, we design a 256-bit EEPROM IP using only logic process-based devices. We propose EEPROM core circuits, a control gate (CG) and a tunnel gate (TG) driving circuit, to limit the voltages between the devices within 5.5V; and we propose DC-DC converters : VPP (=+4.75V), VNN (-4.75V), and VNNL (=VNN/3) generation circuit. In addition, we propose switching powers, CG_HV, CG_LV, TG_HV, TG_LV, VNNL_CG, VNNL_TG switching circuit, to be supplied for the CG and TG driving circuit. Simulation results under the typical simulation condition show that the power consumptions in the read, erase, and program mode are $12.86{\mu}W$, $22.52{\mu}W$, and $22.58{\mu}W$ respectively. Furthermore, the manufactured test chip operated normally and generated its target voltages of VPP, VNN, and VNNL as 4.69V, -4.74V, and -1.89V.