High Sensitivity CMOS Voltage-to-Frequency Converter and High-Speed Current-Mode Sense Amplifier for SRAMs

• Main Authors: Chih-Chen Li, 李志琛
• Other Authors: Chua-Chin Wang
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 2003
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/93936796067858463112

碩士 === 國立中山大學 === 電機工程學系研究所 === 91 === The first topic of this thesis is to propose a novel voltage-to-frequency converter (VFC) to provide high sensitivity. The VFC circuit is composed of one current mirror, one current multiplier, and voltage window comparators. The proposed VFC tracks the variations of the stored charge of a built-in capacitor. The voltage window comparator monitors the voltage of the capacitor to determine whether the output is pulled high or pulled down. The worth-case linear range of the output frequency of the proposed VFC is 0 to 55 MHz provided that the input voltage is 0 to 0.9 V. The error is less than 9% while the power dissipation is 0.218 mW. The second topic is to carry out a novel CMOS current-mode high- speed sense amplifier (SA). The proposed SA is composed by cascading a current-mode sense amplifier and a voltage-mode sense amplifier. The small input impedance of the current-mode amplifier alleviates the loading effect on the bitlines of SRAM cells such that the sensing speed is enhanced. The voltage-mode amplifier is responsible for boosting the logic levels to full swing. The worst access time of the proposed design is found to be less than 1.26 ns with a 1 pF load on outputs. The power dissipation is merely 0.835 mW at 793 MHz.