A Compact Power-on-Reset Circuit With Configurable Brown-Out Detection

A compact power-on-reset (POR) circuit with a configurable brown-out reset (BOR) function is presented. An integrated voltage reference (VR) circuit provides a constant bias voltage that facilitates voltage-triggered POR/BOR operation, reliably preventing POR signal generation when the ramping supply voltage ( ${V} _{\text {DD}}$ ) level is too low. Moreover, the proposed POR circuit features a fast, configurable POR/BOR operation owing to an inverter-based trip point detector (TPD), which triggers the reset signal with a programmable trip point. The prototype POR circuit achieves a POR level higher than 752 mV with a maximum POR delay of $16.4~\mu $ s at a 0.8–1.2-V ${V} _{\text {DD}}$ , supporting a wide range of supply ramping time from $1~\mu $ s to 1 s. In addition, the prototype detects brown-out events with a supply drop of 0.1–0.4 V, generating the BOR signal. Designed using a 28-nm CMOS process, the prototype has a compact active area of $995.3~\mu $ m² and a quiescent current of 162–974 nA at a 1-V ${V} _{\text {DD}}$ .