9.9 V high-voltage switch in a standard 180 nm CMOS technology for MEMS inclinometers

Abstract

In this paper a high-voltage switch, capable of delivering a voltage of 9.9 V to a MEMS actuator is presented. This circuit is implemented in a standard 180 nm CMOS technology with a nominal voltage of 3.3 V for the I/O transistors. The switch is implemented following the stacked transistors principle, to ensure that none of the devices is stressed beyond acceptable limits. Moreover, all the auxiliary circuitry such as the pre-driver and voltage buffers required to generate the intermediate voltage levels are described in detail. Compared to other designs shown in the literature, the implementation presented here enables the largest tuning of the output range, from 5 V to 9.9 V. Post-layout simulation results validate the successful operation of the proposed architecture.