Aspects and solutions to designing standard LVCMOS I/O buffers in 90nm process

Low voltage complementary metal oxide semiconductor (LVCMOS) buffers provide single ended IO interface to the external devices in system on chip (SoC) designs. This paper covers functional operations of basic blocks of the LVCMOS output buffer and input buffer in detail and the design considerations and challenges at each phase of the design. It also explains how the phenomena such as the hot carrier effect, gate oxide integrity and the like affect the performance and reliability of the buffer and the techniques employed to cope with the effects.