An ultra-low leakage and small-area level shifter based on super-cut-off mechanism

In this paper, a novel level shifter design with ultra-low leakage power and an extremely compact area is proposed. The presented structure is composed of an input inverter, a Wilson-like current mirror, and an output inverter. To minimize the leakage power, a super-cut-off pull-down network and a stacked pull-up network are proposed in our structure. Moreover, the novel architecture employs the multi-threshold CMOS (MTCMOS) and sizing technology to minimize the layout area. The prototype has been fabricated by the SMIC 55 nm MTCMOS technology with an area of 5.614 mu m2. Experimental results show that the average leakage of our level shifter is extremely 21.62 pW low power when converting a 0.3 V input to 1.2 V output. At the same time, the average propagation delay and the average energy per transition of the presented structure are 24.06 ns and 4.42 fJ, respectively.