A Single-supply True Voltage Level Shifter.pptVIP

A Single-supply True Voltage Level Shifter Rajesh Garg Gagandeep Mallarapu Sunil P. Khatri Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Texas AM University, College Station, TX Outline Introduction Previous Work Our Approach Experimental Results Conclusions Introduction System-on-chip and multi-core computing architectures Increasingly used for many applications Employ voltage scaling to meet power and energy requirements Contain many voltage domains operating at different supply voltage levels Different voltage domains communicate with each other Efficient voltage level shifters (VLS) are required to interface these voltage domains Should be fast, and also consume low power (leakage and dynamic) Introduction Input (VDDI) and output (VDDO) domains When VDDI VDDO, an inverter can be used When VDDI VDDO, special VLS required. In case an inverter is used, leakage may be too high. Conventional VLS need two supply voltages Need to route VDDI supply voltage along with signal wire Supply wires are typically very wide May result in routing congestion and excessive area utilization DVS is employed to further reduce power consumption At different times, VDDI can be greater than or less than VDDO Conventional VLS’s need supply voltages of all input signals from different domains Further increase area utilization and make routing more complex We would like to address both the above issues. In other words… Introduction Need single supply VLS’s Perform voltage level conversions using only VDDO supply voltage This will ease placement and as well as routing constraints Need “true” VLS’s The same VLS should handle the cases when VDDI VDDO and VDDI VDDO Our VLS presented is this talk meets these requirements No prior approach exist which can perform both low-to-high and high-to-low voltage level conversion using a single supply voltage Previous Work Several previous approaches utilize dual supply voltage [ Wang et al. 2001, Tan et al. 2002] Focused on minimiz