Miscellaneous active electrical nonlinear devices – circuits – and – Specific signal discriminating without subsequent control – By amplitude
Patent
1994-12-27
1996-06-11
Tran, Toan
Miscellaneous active electrical nonlinear devices, circuits, and
Specific signal discriminating without subsequent control
By amplitude
327564, 365203, G01R 1900, G11C 700
Patent
active
055259189
ABSTRACT:
A pre-sense amplifier (10) is disclosed. The pre-sense amplifier (10) increases a low-going bit line signal from a cell column (24) by an amount approximately equal to the threshold voltage of an n-channel MOS transistor. The pre-sense amplifier (10) includes a first channel (12) and a second channel (14), each channel having a precharge/transfer transistor (16) and an output precharge transistor (18). The output precharge transistors (18) are clocked to pull the inputs to a sense amplifier (26) to a positive supply voltage. At the same time, the precharge/transfer transistors (16) precharge the bit lines of a cell column (24) to a voltage equal to the positive supply voltage less their threshold voltage. When the cell column (24) pulls one of the bit lines low, the corresponding precharge/transfer transistor (16) connects the bit line with the sense amplifier input, redistributing the charge across the bit line capacitance and the sense amplifier input capacitance. Because the bit line capacitance is much greater than the sense amplifier input capacitance, the redistributed charge creates voltage at the sense amplifier input approximately equal to the voltage that was precharged on the low-going bit line.
REFERENCES:
patent: 3949381 (1976-04-01), Dennard et al.
patent: 4239994 (1980-12-01), Stewart
patent: 4811300 (1989-03-01), Lanfranca
patent: 4855628 (1989-08-01), Jim
patent: 4932002 (1990-06-01), Houston
patent: 5231318 (1993-07-01), Reddy
Alliance Semiconductor Corporation
Sako Bradley T.
Tran Toan
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