An Energy-Efficient and Wide-Range Voltage Level Shifter With Dual Current Mirror

This brief presents an energy-efficient level shifter (LS) to convert a subthreshold input signal to an above-threshold output signal. In order to achieve a wide range of conversion, a dual current mirror (CM) structure consisting of a virtual CM and an auxiliary CM is proposed. The circuit has been implemented and optimized in SMIC 40-nm technology. The postlayout simulation demonstrates that the new LS can achieve voltage conversion from 0.2 to 1.1 V. Moreover, at the target voltage of 0.3 V, the proposed LS exhibits an average propagation delay of 66.48 ns, a total energy per transition of 72.31 fJ, and a static power consumption of 88.4 pW, demonstrating an improvement of 6.0x, 13.1x, and 89.0x, respectively, when compared with Wilson CM-based LS.