Bipolar latch with compensated keep‐alive current

A permanent current in addition to the main clocked current is sometimes used to increase the maximum clock rate of a bipolar latch. Although it speeds up the activation of a clocked differential stage, it deteriorates the latch function by the additional current in the inactive phase of each differential stage. Thus, a keep‐alive current must be kept small with respect to the main clocked current. In this Letter, a compensation technique is shown avoiding the erroneous output of a keep‐alive current. It still speeds up the activation of the main transistor pair, but results in a constant symmetric offset without affecting the differential value of the output voltage. In simulations of flip‐flops and clocked comparators, this compensated keep‐alive current has a much larger effect on the maximum clock rate than the uncompensated keep‐alive current used so far.