Design of a Subthreshold-Supply Bootstrapped CMOS Inverter Based on an Active Leakage-Current Reduction Technique

This brief presents a bootstrapped CMOS inverter operated with a subthreshold power supply. In addition to improving the driving ability, a large gate voltage swing from -V_DD to 2V_DD suppresses the subthreshold leakage current. As compared with other reported works, the proposed bootstrapped inverter uses fewer transistors operated in the subthreshold region. Therefore, our design has shorter delay time. The Monte Carlo analysis results indicate that a sigma of delay time is only 6.3 ns under the process and temperature variations with 200-mV operation. Additionally, a test chip is fabricated in the 90-nm SPRVT low-K CMOS process. Chip measurement results demonstrate the feasibility of operating ten-stage bootstrapped inverters with a 200-fF loading of each stage at 200-mV V_DD. The test chip is able to achieve 10-MHz clock rate at 200 mV V_DD, the power consumption is 1.01 μW, and the leakage power is 107 nW.