• The Journal of Korea Institute of Information, Electronics, and Communication Technology
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• v.15 no.2
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• pp.144-151
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• 2022

In this paper, a 1.5V 256kb eFlash memory IP with low area DC-DC converter is designed for battery application. Therefore, in this paper, 5V NMOS precharging transistor is used instead of cross-coupled 5V NMOS transistor, which is a circuit that precharges the voltage of the pumping node to VIN voltage in the unit charge pump circuit for the design of a low-area DC-DC converter. A 5V cross-coupled PMOS transistor is used as a transistor that transfers the boosted voltage to the VOUT node. In addition, the gate node of the 5V NMOS precharging transistor is made to swing between VIN voltage and VIN+VDD voltage using a boost-clock generator. Furthermore, to swing the clock signal, which is one node of the pumping capacitor, to full VDD during a small ring oscillation period in the multi-stage charge pump circuit, a local inverter is added to each unit charge pump circuit. And when exiting from erase mode and program mode and staying at stand-by state, HV NMOS transistor is used to precharge to VDD voltage instead of using a circuit that precharges the boosted voltage to VDD voltage. Since the proposed circuit is applied to the DC-DC converter circuit, the layout area of the 256kb eFLASH memory IP is reduced by about 6.5% compared to the case of using the conventional DC-DC converter circuit.