Design of Power-Efficient and Wide-Range Voltage Level Shifter

Abstract

The present work presents a wide-range and low-power voltage level shifter for efficient performance in dual-supply applications. The proposed circuit is made efficient by varying the strength of pull-down and pull-up transistors. The width/length ratio is varied, i.e., width/length (strength) is increased for pull-down transistors and decreased for pull-up transistors. This approach is based on the fact that the strength of the pull-up device is lowered while the pull-down device pulls the output down. At the same time, the pull-down device’s strength is increased by an auxiliary circuit that consumes low power. The proposed circuit is simulated in 0.18µm technology Cadence Virtuoso software. The simulation results show that the proposed circuit can convert extremely low level of input voltage into high output voltage level. That is, it can convert low input voltage VDDL=0.7V to high output voltage VDDH=3V with power dissipation of 1.9314 µW