Design and realization of a voltage detector based on current comparison in a 40nm technology

A design of low-power voltage detector (VD) based on current comparison technology is presented. This VD samples the power supply voltage and converts the sampled voltage to a current which will be compared with a reference. The current comparison technology simplifies the design without use of the resistor string and voltage comparators, and thus reduces the core area. The VD detects three thresholds successively while keeping only one detecting portion working at a time to minimize power consumption. The VD is designed and realized in a standard 40nm process. The measurement result agrees well with designed parameters with 3s variations less than 100mV. Meanwhile, the power consumption keeps lower than 10µW.