Computer-aided Design of Cross-voltage-domain Energy-optimized Tapered Buffers

Abstract

This paper introduces a computer-aided low-power design method for tapered buffers that address given load capacitances, output transition times, and source impedances. Cross-voltage-domain tapered buffers involving a low-voltage domain in the frontier stages and a highvoltage domain in the posterior stages are further discussed which breaks the trade-off between the energy dissipation and the driving capability in conventional designs. As an essential circuit block, a dedicated analytical model for the level-shifter is proposed. The energy-optimized tapered buffer design is verified for different source and load conditions in a 180-nm CMOS process. The single-𝑉 𝐷𝐷 buffer model achieves an average inaccuracy of 8.65% on the transition loss compared with Spice simulation results. Crossvoltage tapered buffers can be optimized to further remarkably reduce the energy consumption. The study finds wide applications in energy-efficient switching-mode analog applications.