Design of Level Shifter with Wide Input Voltage Range

Abstract

The level shifters are crucial primitives in the multi supply voltage circuits and systems. In this project, a level shifter is proposed to achieve the conversion from the sub-threshold voltage to the above threshold voltage for different input voltages.  It is a hybrid structure consisting of the Wilson current mirror and cross- coupled level shifter. By addressing the voltage drop issue of the level shifter based on the Wilson current mirror, the leakage power is significantly reduced, with the advantage of wide input voltage range for the Wilson current mirror level shifter well preserved. In addition, the multi-threshold CMOS (MTCMOS) technology is employed to provide more flexibility for our ultra-low power design. The reporter simulation results using 65nm CMOS process validate our proposed implementation and an ultra-low power consumption of 5.6 uJ per conversion from 0.09 V to 1.2 V at 1MHz is achieved without the need of any intermediate power supply.