A Fully Integrated 10-V Pulse Driver Using Multiband Pulse-Frequency Modulation in 65-nm CMOS

Abstract

This brief describes a fully integrated 10-V pulse driver. It comprises a four-stage switched-capacitor voltage multiplier (SCVM) and a dedicated high-voltage output driver (HVOD) with multiband pulse-frequency modulation (MPFM) to generate efficiently 10 V regulated output pulses. Specifically, an analog/digital hybrid-controlled current-starved ring oscillator (HCRO) modulates the switching frequencies at distinct bands to regulate the high-voltage (HV) supply for the HVOD, while enabling fast output transitions with an improved driving efficiency. Prototyped in 65-nm bulk CMOS, the driver demonstrates 10-V pulse generations over a 0.1-to-1-MHz range for a 15 pF//50 <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\text{k}\Omega $ </tex-math></inline-formula> load. With the proposed MPFM, this work measures an overall driving efficiency of up to 19.9%, corresponding to a <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\sim 1.6\times $ </tex-math></inline-formula> improvement over prior arts. The measured output rise time of 119 ns is also ~25% faster when compared with using the conventional pulse-frequency modulation (PFM) scheme.