A 1.8V 30nJ adaptive program-voltage (20V) generator for 3D-integrated NAND flash SSD

Decreasing power consumption is the key design issue of SSDs. A typical SSD consists of more than 16 NAND Flash memories, DRAMs and a NAND controller. Since the NAND write performance is 10MB/s [1,2], to raise the write speed of SSD to the level of HDD, 100MB/s, 8 or more NAND chips in SSD are simultaneously programmed. As the feature size decreases, the total bitline capacitance in a chip increases beyond 200nF. If 8 or more NAND chips operate in parallel, a large current of 800mA flows to charge the bitline capacitance in a sub-30nm SSD [3]. A good strategy to decrease the power is lowering the supply voltage, V
DD
, from 3.3 to 1.8V. Yet, at 1.8V, the power consumption of conventional charge pumps, used to generate the 20V program voltage, V
PGM
, drastically increases and the total power consumption of the NAND does not decrease, as shown in Fig. 13.2.1(a). The charge-pump area more than doubles, which increases the NAND chip area by 5 to 10%. To overcome this problem, we implement a low-power program-voltage generator (PVG) using a boost converter with an adaptive-frequency and duty-cycle (AFD) controller.