A 1 V CMOS programmable accurate charge pump with wide output voltage range

A 1 V, programmable, accurate, high speed, single-ended charge pump is proposed, suitable for low voltage PLLs. It is designed in TSMC 90-nm digital CMOS process and it consists of four switches in a current steering configuration, a unity gain rail to rail buffer for the charge sharing effect elimination, one more rail to rail amplifier for minimizing the DC current mismatch, a programmable current bias circuitry and two drivers based on the standard cell XOR gates specific configuration for achieving good synchronization between all charge pump input pulses at the PLL lock state. Replica biasing technique is applied to all charge pump switches. Current glitches and charge mismatch are suppressed by employing a mechanism with additional switches at the output. It exhibits a maximum DC current mismatch of 1% and charge mismatch of 6% over a wide output voltage range of 0.7 V for the entire range of output currents. The wide range of the output voltage remains relatively constant and independent of the selected charge pump current amplitude. This is attained by applying appropriate variation of the W/L ratios of the bias cascode current sources via the employment of additional programmable switches such that their saturation voltages remain relatively constant, something which in turn enables the output currents range to be as wide as it is required.

► We propose a 1 V, programmable, accurate, high speed, single-ended charge pump.
► It exhibits a maximum DC current mismatch of 1% and charge mismatch of 6%.
► The output voltage range is 0.15–0.85 V for the entire range of currents (20–200 μA).
► Charge mismatch and current glitches are reduced using additional switches at the output.