A novel mixed-voltage I/O buffer with low-voltage thin-oxide CMOS transistors

A novel mixed-voltage I/O buffer only used thin gate-oxide transistors is presented in this paper. This new design can successfully avoid the undesired leakage current paths and the gate-oxide reliability that occur in the conventional mixed-voltage CMOS I/O buffers. With the use of a bootstrapped circuit to increase the gate voltage of the related NMOS devices, the power supply voltage could be transmitted entirely without threshold-voltage loss.