CMOS SoCs can reduce power consumption by adopting voltage scaling (VS) technologies, where the level converter (LC) is required between voltage domains to avoid dc current. However, the LC often induces high delay penalty and usually results in non-balanced rise and fall delays. Therefore, the performance of the LC strongly affects the effectiveness of VS technologies. In this paper, heuristic sizing methodology for designing a state-of-the-art LC is developed and proposed. Using the proposed methodology, we can design the LC to achieve high performance with balanced rise and fall delay times in a deterministic way.

CMOS SoCs can reduce power consumption while maintaining performance by adopting voltage scaling (VS) technologies. The operating speed of the level converter (LC) strongly affects the effectiveness of VS technologies. However, PVT variations can cause serious problems to the LC, because the state-of-the-art LC designs do not give enough attention to this issue. In this work, we proposed to analyze the impact of PVT variations on the performance of the LC using a previously developed heuristic sizing methodology. Based on the evaluation results from different operating corners with different offset voltages and temperatures, we proposed a variation-tolerant LC that achieves both high performance and low energy with a high tolerability for PVT variations.