• The Journal of Korea Institute of Information, Electronics, and Communication Technology
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• v.12 no.3
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• pp.312-320
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• 2019

In this paper, we design a 512Kb eFlash IP using 110nm eFlash cells. We proposed eFlash core circuit such as row driver circuit (CG/SL driver circuit), write BL driver circuit (write BL switch circuit and PBL switch select circuit), read BL switch circuit, and read BL S/A circuit which satisfy eFlash cell program, erase and read operation. In addition, instead of using a cross-coupled NMOS transistor as a conventional unit charge pump circuit, we propose a circuit boosting the gate of the 12V NMOS precharging transistor whose body is GND, so that the precharging node of the VPP unit charge pump is normally precharged to the voltage of VIN and thus the pumping current is increased in the VPP (boosted voltage) voltage generator circuit supplying the VPP voltage of 9.5V in the program mode and that of 11.5V in the erase mode. A 12V native NMOS pumping capacitor with a bigger pumping current and a smaller layout area than a PMOS pumping capacitor was used as the pumping capacitor. On the other hand, the layout area of the 512Kb eFlash memory IP designed based on the 110nm eFlash process is $933.22{\mu}m{\times}925{\mu}m(=0.8632mm^2)$.

• 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.