Abstract:
Non-volatile memories have continued to retrieve their stronghold presence in the electronic
industry wherever memory intensive applications are required. The present technologies like
Flash have dominated the industry for so long. However there is a continuous shrinking of the
technology nodes and now reaching the edge. This shrinking leads to challenging design of
the floating gate devices used in Flash memories. The number of electrons stored in the
floating gate decreases. As a result, there is a continuous focus on emerging trends and
solutions to replace the existing technologies.
Phase change memories (PCM) have shown a growing trend in the recent years. It exploits
the concept of the phase transition of a chalcogenide material from amorphous to crystalline.
PCM characteristics approximate those of DRAM and Flash memories, making it their strong
competitor. Its main advantages are large cycling endurance, fast program and access time
and extended scalability.
In this dissertation, a voltage regulator has been developed in 110nm BCD9s technology for
high voltage management with reference to phase change memory system. The error
amplifier of the regulator is a three-stage operational amplifier designed to achieve a high
gain with a sufficient phase margin. The voltage regulator is capable of regulating a wide
voltage range, which is made possible by using a current based feedback system for the
regulator. The varying current feedback enables to vary the feedback to the opamp,
providing a variable regulation scheme. The regulator provides a minimum granularity of 100
mV starting from 1.2 V onwards. The feedback current has a minimum granularity of 1 μA
supporting the 100 mV step of the regulator.
