High Speed Low Gate Leakage Large Capacitive-Load Driver Circuits for Low-Voltage CMOS

In this work, a high-speed full swing driver for large capacitive-loads for low-voltage CMOS applications is presented. The driver which has multi-path for driving the load has a low gate leakage. It works similar to a standard CMOS gate and can be implemented in any CMOS fabrication technology. The circuit does not use extra bootstrap capacitors, has a small effective input capacitance, and can operate in a wide range of supply voltages. Analytical expressions for the sizing of the transistors which should be determined for any load capacitance are also presented. The driver is compared to the previously proposed circuits in a 65 nm CMOS technology using HSPICE simulations. The results show that the circuit operates 20% faster than the previous drivers and its gate leakage is about half of the gate leakage of bootstrap drivers.