A new charge pump circuit dealing with gate-oxide reliability issue in low-voltage processes

Charge pump circuits have been widely used in DRAM, EEPROM, flash memories, and in some low-voltage designs. In this paper, a new charge pump circuit is proposed. The charge transfer switches of the new proposed circuit can be turned on and turned off completely, so its pumping gain is much higher than the traditional designs. Besides, there is no gate-oxide reliability problem in the proposed charge pump circuit. The test chips have been implemented in a 3.3 V 0.35 μm CMOS process. The measured results show that the proposed charge pump circuit has better performance than that of prior arts. The proposed circuit can be used in low-voltage process because of its high pumping gain and no overstress across the gate oxide of the devices.