A 1.2-to-8V Charge-Pump with Improved Power Efficiency for Non-Volatille Memories

A charge-pump architecture is presented with an improved power efficiency and a high voltage output compared to the known Dickson and Favrat architectures due to partial reuse of the charge stored on the capacitors. An 8-stage charge pump fabricated in a 0.13 μm CMOS process has a 1.2V supply and a 100MHz clock. The measured performance indicates that the efficiency can be 25% higher than a Favrat cell. The efficiency increases with the number of stages, reaching 60% with 10 stages.