Level Shifter Design for Low Power Applications

Abstract

With scaling of Vt sub-threshold leakage power is increasing and expected to become significant part of total power consumption.In present work three new configurations of level shifters for low power application in 0.35µm technology have been presented. The proposed circuits utilize the merits of stacking technique with smaller leakage current and reduction in leakage power. Conventional level shifter has been improved by addition of three NMOS transistors, which shows total power consumption of 402.2264pW as compared to 0.49833nW with existing circuit. Single supply level shifter has been modified with addition of two NMOS transistors that gives total power consumption of 108.641pW as compared to 31.06nW. Another circuit, contention mitigated level shifter (CMLS) with three additional transistors shows total power consumption of 396.75pW as compared to 0.4937354nW. Three proposed circuit’s shows better performance in terms of power consumption with a little conciliation in delay. Output level of 3.3V has been obtained with input pulse of 1.6V for all proposed circuits.