Fast and Wide Range Voltage Conversion in Multisupply Voltage Designs

TLDR: Because of a novel architecture combined with the use of multithreshold CMOS technique, the proposed circuit guarantees robust voltage shifting from the deep subthreshold to the above-threshold domain while exhibiting fast response and low energy consumption.

Abstract: Multisupply voltage design technique is widely used in modern system-on-chips to tradeoff energy and speed. Level shifters (LSs) allow different voltage domains to be interfaced. In this brief, a new LS is presented for fast and wide range voltage conversion. Because of a novel architecture combined with the use of multithreshold CMOS technique, the proposed circuit guarantees robust voltage shifting from the deep subthreshold to the above-threshold domain while exhibiting fast response and low energy consumption. When implemented in a 90-nm technology node, considering process-voltage-temperature variations, the proposed design reliably converts 100-mV input signals into 1 V output signals. Post-layout simulation results demonstrate that the new LS shows a propagation delay of 16.6 ns, a static power dissipation of 8.7 nW and a total energy per transition of only 77 fJ for a 0.2 V 1-MHz input pulse.