An Energy-Efficient Level Shifter for Ultra Low-Voltage Digital Lsis

Authors

Heng You, Institute of Microelectronics of Chinese Academy of Sciences
Jia Yuan, Institute of Microelectronics of Chinese Academy of Sciences
Weidi Tang, University of Science and Technology of China
Shushan Qiao, Institute of Microelectronics of Chinese Academy of Sciences
Yong Hei, Portland State UniversityFollow

Published In

IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems II: Express Briefs

Document Type

Citation

Publication Date

12-1-2020

Abstract

This brief presents a fast and energy-efficient level shifter with wide conversion range. To achieve both energy-efficient and high-speed voltage level conversion, a novel architecture combined with multi-threshold CMOS technique is employed in the proposed circuit. A mixed-threshold current mirror circuit is proposed to solve the reduced swing issue in the prior arts. Moreover, auxiliary bias circuits are inserted to guarantee that the low-threshold pull down networks could be strongly cut off while in leaking state. As a result, the power consumption would be reduced to a great extent. Measurement results based on SMIC 55-nm MTCMOS process demonstrate that the proposed level shifter could provide robust voltage conversion from 0.12V to 1.2V. At the target voltage of 0.3V, the proposed level shifter shows a propagation delay of 17.86ns, a static power of 73.95pW, and an energy per transition of 26.59fJ for input frequency of 1MHz.

Rights

copyright 2020 IEEE

Locate the Document

https://doi.org/10.1109/TCSII.2020.2980681

DOI

10.1109/TCSII.2020.2980681

Persistent Identifier

https://archives.pdx.edu/ds/psu/34506

Publisher

IEEE

Citation Details

You, H., Yuan, J., Tang, W., Qiao, S., & Hei, Y. (2020). An Energy-Efficient Level Shifter for Ultra Low-Voltage Digital LSIs. IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems II: Express Briefs, 67(12), 3357–3361. https://doi.org/10.1109/tcsii.2020.2980681