In this paper, we first study the behavior of gate leakage current in a simple inverter. We make some important observations about the gate leakage in both PMOS and NMOS devices. We then study the trade off between power and delay in a standard inverter within a particular buffer chain when reducing the size of the pull-down device. In the last part of this paper, we present an alternate leakage suppressed inverter for driving large loads. We finally compare the performance of our proposed circuit with those of standard and scaled-down inverters and show that we can significantly reduce the standby power in certain situations with a modest reduction in speed.
['Ali Bastani', 'Charles A. Zukowski']
Design of superbuffers in sub-100nm CMOS technologies with significant gate leakage