from left to right and the capacitors C1, C2 etc. When the clock is low, D1 will charge C1 to Vin. When goes high the top plate of C1 is pushed up to 2Vin. D1 is then turned off and D2 turned on and C2 begins to charge to 2Vin. On the next clock cycle again goes low and now goes high pushing the top plate of C2 to 3Vin. D2 switches off and D3 switches on, charging C3 to 3Vin and so on with charge passing up the chain, hence the name charge pump. The final diode-capacitor cell in the cascade is connected to ground rather than a clock phase and hence is not a multiplier; it is a peak detector which merely provides smoothing. There are a number of factors which reduce the output from the ideal case of nVin. One of these is the threshold voltage, VT of the switching device, that is, the voltage required to turn it on. The output will be reduced by at least nVT due to the volt drops across the switches. Schottky diodes are commonly used in Dickson multipliers for their low forward voltage drop, amongst other reasons. Another difficulty is that there are parasitic capacitances to ground at each node. These parasitic capacitances act as voltage dividers with the circuit's storage capacitors reducing the output voltage still further. Up to a point, a higher clock frequency is beneficial: the ripple is reduced and the high frequency makes the remaining ripple easier to filter. Also the size of capacitors needed is reduced since less charge needs to be stored per cycle. However, losses through stray capacitance increase with increasing clock frequency and a practical limit is around a few hundred kilohertz. Dickson multipliers are frequently found in integrated circuits (ICs) where they are used to increase a low-voltage battery supply to the voltage needed by the IC. It is advantageous to the IC designer and manufacturer to be able to use the same technology and the same basic device throughout the IC. For this reason, in the popular CMOS technology ICs the transistor which forms the basic building block of circuits is the MOSFET. Consequently, the diodes in the Dickson multiplier are often replaced with MOSFETs wired to behave as diodes. The diode-wired MOSFET version of the Dickson multiplier does not work very well at very low voltages because of the