High‐performance wide‐ V DDH ‐range level converter for mixed‐signal systems

Abstract

A high-performance wide-V DDH-range level converter (LC) is presented for mixed-signal systems. The proposed LC achieves a low power-delay product over a wide range of V DDH with V DDL in the near-threshold region. The proposed LC uses a feed-forward signal to pull down the output voltage at low V DDH, without increasing the size of the nMOS diode for the pseudo-V DDL. A comparison with conventional LCs shows that the proposed LC not only supports high V DDH but is also robust at low V DDH while exhibiting high performance.