High voltage charge pump with triple well diodes in a 0.13 µm bulk CMOS process

This paper presents charge pump circuits with modified triple well diodes as charge transfer switches for charging on-chip pulse generation circuits in a low-voltage bulk CMOS process. Guard-rings and isolation deep n-wells are used to improve the breakdown voltages and reduce leakage currents of the diodes. Model parameters of the triple well diode are extracted based on measured diode characteristics. These parameters are then used to analyze our charge pump. The proposed charge pump circuits are implemented in a commercial 0.13 μm bulk CMOS process. The output voltage of the four-stage charge pump circuit can be up to 18.1 V, which is much higher than the n-well/p-substrate breakdown voltage (~10 V) of the given process.