The patent badge is an abbreviated version of the USPTO patent document. The patent badge does contain a link to the full patent document.
The patent badge is an abbreviated version of the USPTO patent document. The patent badge covers the following: Patent number, Date patent was issued, Date patent was filed, Title of the patent, Applicant, Inventor, Assignee, Attorney firm, Primary examiner, Assistant examiner, CPCs, and Abstract. The patent badge does contain a link to the full patent document (in Adobe Acrobat format, aka pdf). To download or print any patent click here.
Patent No.:
Date of Patent:
Apr. 15, 2008
Filed:
Dec. 22, 2005
Helmut Schneider, Munich, DE;
Harald Streif, Burlington, VT (US);
Helmut Schneider, Munich, DE;
Harald Streif, Burlington, VT (US);
Infineon Technologies AG, Neubiberg, DE;
Abstract
A semiconductor integrated circuit device and method for reducing gate induced leakage current associated with circuits of the semiconductor electrical device, such as a semiconductor integrated circuit memory device. During a standby mode, a voltage supplied to a plurality of circuits is reduced so as to reduce gate induced leakage (GIDL) current associated with said plurality of circuits. During time intervals while in the standby mode, the voltage supplied to a subset of said plurality of circuits is increased to a level necessary for a refresh function associated with said subset of said plurality of circuits and then it is reduced upon completion of said refresh function. In the example a semiconductor memory device, the circuits that are manipulated in this manner are wordline driver circuits. A cyclical self-refresh operation is provided to refresh the WLs associated with subsets of the wordline driver circuits to reduce the overall GIDL current associated with the plurality of wordline driver circuits.