Semiconductor device having a pump circuit
AssigneeKabushiki Kaisha Toshiba
InventorsToru Tanzawa, Shigeru Atsumi
Life of this patent
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Abstract
A standby-mode booster circuit is activated in both a standby mode and an active mode and boosts up a power supply voltage to generate a booster voltage and output it from an output terminal. An active-mode booster circuit is activated in the active mode. In the active-mode booster circuit, an NMOS transistor is first turned on in response to a reset signal supplied from a reset signal generation circuit and then a connection node of capacitors is reset to the power supply voltage by the NMOS transistor. The boost operation is then started to output the booster voltage from the output terminal.
Claims15
A pump circuit for a memory device having a row decoder selecting a word line in accordance with an address signal and a column decoder selecting a bit line in accordance with the address signal, the pump circuit comprising:
- a first booster circuit configured to output a first boost voltage at an output node, the output node being connected to the row decoder, said first booster circuit being operated at all times, and
- a second booster circuit configured to output a second boost voltage at an output node, the output node being connected to the output node of said first booster circuit, said second booster circuit being operated when a voltage of the output node is lower than a reference voltage, where said second booster circuit is operational according to an active signal generated by an address transition detection signal which is generated when an address is changed.
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.