Fast and energy-efficient low-voltage level shifters

This paper presents two novel low-voltage level shifter designs: one based on cross-coupled PMOS transistors and the other using current mirror structure. These two level shifters are designed to address the problems of the existing state-of-the-art level shifters. Simulation at 65 nm shows that both of the proposed level shifters achieve significantly better performance (up to 12 x) and energy consumption (up to 8 x) than the state-of-the-art level shifters with similar or less area consumption while operating from near-threshold to super-threshold region, making them optimal for level shifting in low-power systems with multiple scalable voltage domains. (C) 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.