A fast and energy-efficient level shifter with wide shifting range from sub-threshold up to I/O voltage

Abstract

This paper presents a fast and energy-efficient current mirror based level shifter with wide shifting range from sub-threshold voltage up to I/O voltage. Small delay and low power consumption are achieved by addressing the non-full output swing and charge sharing issues in the level shifter from [4]. The measurement results show that the proposed level shifter can convert from 0.21V up to 3.3V with significantly improved delay and power consumption over the existing level shifters. Compared with [4], the maximum reduction of delay, switching energy and leakage power are 3X, 19X, 29X respectively when converting 0.3V to a higher voltage between 0.6V and 3.3V.