A Compact Industrial-Grade Multi-Threshold Brown-Out Detector

This work introduces the smallest reported brown-out detector (BOD) that uses selectable low-power reference voltages, as well as supply voltage division levels, to detect brown-out events at different supply ranges. In contrast to reported BOD architectures, the proposed BOD compensates the low-temperature impact for large impedance branches, particularly at large slewing of ramp-down supply voltages. The circuit was implemented in a 180nm CMOS standard technology allocating an area of 60μm×100μm including the synthesized logic. Measurement results over voltage and temperature variations show a robust performance within the industrial temperature range from -40°C to 125°C. The BOD draws a typical current of 200nA with five different levels for diverse system-on-a-chip applications.