Level-Shifted 0.5-μm BiCMOS Circuits

Abstract

A new circuit concept, level shifting, is presented for scaled BiCMOS circuits. A full-swing, ground-level-shifted (FS-GLS) BiCMOS circuit has shown approximately 1.6 X speed improvement over a conventional partial-swing BiCMOS circuit, and a 4 x better driving capability over a CMOS circuit at 3.3 V. With a high-performance p-n-p device, simulations show that the level-shifted complementary BiCMOS can provide further speed leverage over the n-p-n only BiCMOS circuit. © 1990 IEEE