A regulated charge pump (CP) with an extended range of load current is presented. A power-efficient adaptive feedback controller is adopted. Verified by a 0.18µm CMOS technology with a power supply of 3.3V, the measured output voltage of the CP is regulated above 5V when the load current is varied from 2.5mA to 50mA. The measured power efficiency spans from 81.7% at lighter load to 75.2% when load current is 50mA. The measured output ripples are small and below 24mV.

A novel voltage level controller for low-power charge pump converters will be presented in this paper. The proposed voltage level controller would react according to the pumped voltage in the charge-transfer-switch (CTS) converter. For the CTS circuit, the pumping operation would be degraded by the charge sharing effect in the auxiliary switch path. In this study, a voltage shifter was used as the voltage level controller to overcome this serious problem without consuming too much chip area. The simulation results showed that the converter can accept a rated input of 1.5 V and generated an output up to 8 V based on the TSMC 0.35-µm CMOS technology. The layout consumed an area of 125*160 µm2. The highest output obtained in measuring the real chip was 5.5 V which is primarily due to the limitation that the transistor could tolerated. The largest load was estimated as high as 6 mW which is large enough for on-chip application.