SUBWORD LINE DRIVER OF SEMICONDUCTOR MEMORY DEVICE

摘要

PROBLEM TO BE SOLVED: To lessen the load on a booster circuit by transmitting the word line voltage on a main word line to a subword line through selective switching of address lines. SOLUTION: When a row address strobe signal makes a transition to logical low during the waiting operation of a chip, the chip is activated and an externally applied address is latches as a row address. A part of the row address, i.e., the least significant two bits, is decoded by a suborn decoder 80 and four types of prerecording signal are sent on address lines i-1 and any one line has the level of boosted voltage VBOOT. Another part Ai of row address is also decodes and converted into a voltage and the boosted voltage VBOOT is fed to a selected main word line MWL. A first subword line SWLi is then driven with the boosted voltage VBOOT. This circuitry requires to supply the boosted voltage only to a main word line being selected.