A low-power wide-range voltage level shifter using a modified Wilson current mirror

In this paper, a low-power voltage level shifter is proposed which is able to convert sub-threshold voltage levels of input signal to above-threshold voltage levels. The proposed circuit is based on a modified Wilson current mirror structure which employs an inverter with different gate voltages for its nMOS and pMOS transistors leading to reduce the power consumption of the circuit. Simulation results in a 0.18μm CMOS technology show that the proposed circuit is able to convert input voltage level of 0.35V to the output level of 1.8V with a propagation delay of 47.9 ns, a total power consumption of 229nW, and a power-delay product of 11 fJ for 1MHz input signal frequency.