Energy Efficient Bootstrapped Driver for a Particle Detector in 180 nm SOI Technology

This paper presents the design of a differential buffer/driver circuit based on a modified bootstrapping technique for a radiation hard particle detection application to convert time difference of particle hits to a digital code. The proposed architecture of the circuit comprises of bootstrap capacitors and reduced number of transistors to enhance the gate voltage which further improves the driving capability. For the inherent radiation hard properties, the circuit has been designed and implemented using XFAB 180 nm silicon-on-insulator (SOI) technology with the reduced supply voltage of 0.9 V. The simulation results show that the proposed design provides a delay of 180 ps for the input data frequency of 40 MHz. The figure of merit (FoM), characterized by a power-delay product, is 51 fJ for a load capacitance of 1 pF. The complete differential design including boosting capacitors consumes an area of 66×90 μm
²
.