DB-driver: A low power CMOS bootstrapped differential cross-coupled driver

Abstract

This paper for the first time reports the design of a high speed and low power differential cross-coupled bootstrapped CMOS driver circuit. The circuit design style, based on the proposed differential cross-coupled bootstrapped driver achieves high performance low core area, and fast full-swing operation, even in spite of the fact that the magnitude of the threshold voltage of the CMOS devices cannot be scaled down with the scaling of the power supply voltage. The proposed driver is implemented on 0.13 µm CMOS technology with a power supply of 1.2 V. It is 34% faster and provides 8% less core area when compared to a base-line circuit using an indirect bootstrap technique. In addition, the proposed driver reduces the power consumption by 35%. The superior performance of the proposed circuit over the other differential cross-coupled bootstrapped CMOS driver circuit, for the applications that require high performance, has been verified with post-layout simulation.